SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Spider-Man: Brand New Day truly feels like a new chapter for our favorite web-slinger.

Tom Holland has always had an endearing humility and charisma that meshed well with Peter Parker and his alter ego, Spider-Man. But Spider-Man: Brand New Day, his fourth solo outing as the superhero, gives him mature depth and a layered story about where true strength lies.

Live-action films tend to place Peter perpetually in high school, largely because he first swung into our collective consciousness as a teen in the 1960s. Holland has believably passed for a high school student (apologies to Spideys of years past), but it’s still invigorating to see him adulting as Peter: coordinating street-level heroics from a command center in his own apartment, buying bodega flowers for his Aunt May’s grave, and generally figuring out like other twentysomethings how to make his way in the world.

Picking up about four years since 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens with Peter alone because of the earlier film’s resolution: using a magic spell via Doctor Strange to make everyone who loves Peter forget who he is, so they can remain safe from multiverse perils. That meant watching his best pal Ned (Jacob Batalon, The Wrecking Crew) and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya, Euphoria) go to college with no memories of their time together.

Keeping tabs on them (and torturing himself) through Ned’s Instagram reels, Peter learns the two are back in Manhattan, having graduated from MIT. Meanwhile, he’s kept busy as a street-level crime-fighter, tangling with superpowered sorts like Scorpion (Michael Mando) one minute and tousling a kid’s hair the next. The head of Damage Control (Tramell Tillman, Severance), the agency that helps clean up superpowered mayhem, is grateful for his help, as is NYPD Detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas, The Bear), but she doesn’t need Spidey sense to pick up on the wall-crawler’s loneliness. Being a workaholic, she says, never works out well.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day features more exhilarating web-swinging than Holland’s earlier outings, with the special effects and visual effects teams mimicking Spidey’s poses from various comics. Yet the film also feels more grounded, from the tactile appearance of his costume (noticing the outline of Holland’s features beneath the mask, for instance) to director Destin Daniel Cretton (Wonder Man) blocking shots that show off Spidey’s acrobatic fighting style as much as Holland’s emotional beats.

This is a New York City that adores Spider-Man, by the way, and the film loves to see him there. From walk-up apartments with basement laundry rooms, rooftop rides on the subway, double-decker tourist buses, and sunless courtyards, Peter feels very much a part of the Big Apple in a way reminiscent of 2004’s Spider-Man 2. (I fleetingly wondered how he paid his rent, but the runtime of two hours and twenty-five minutes has other concerns.)

Screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, both returning from No Way Home, also smoothly integrate other Marvel characters in a way that feels organic to the plot, not just table-setting for another film. Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh, Thunderbolts), the new Black Widow, provides intel from a Russian bathhouse in Brighton Beach. Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, Crime 101), wearing a watch-like device that keeps the Hulk at bay, offers scientific advice between physics classes at an uptown university.

Perhaps most amusing is the banter between Peter and Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), the grizzled vigilante known as The Punisher. The Odyssey co-stars are longtime friends, as promotional interviews show, and Cretton mines that bond for genuine laughs and surprising compassion from the shoot-first-ask-questions-later loner and the web-head whose heart’s always in the right place.

While Peter wrestles with whether or how to reconnect with Ned and MJ (albeit not for long, as the three continue their amiable chemistry), he encounters some startling changes in his spider powers and a new threat: a mysterious person (Sadie Sink, Stranger Things) possessing people’s minds. Chases involving actors contorting as if a consciousness jumped from person to person is a low-key yet well-coordinated effect, as unsettling as it was in the 1998 Denzel Washington horror flick Fallen. This ability and motives also raise questions about consent and culpability, exhibiting Peter’s further maturity. There’s a scene late in the film where he soothes someone in pain the way Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) would do for him, and it’s all the more powerful for its gentle stillness.

With great power comes great responsibility, as Spidey’s mantra goes, but Spider-Man: Brand New Day demonstrates a greater power in subtlety and understanding. It’s a fresh take for a superhero film and a beloved character’s welcome metamorphosis.