Only at the end of Jon Watts’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, the third solo Spider-Man film, did Peter Parker (Tom Holland) finally feel like the character from the comics. Divorced from his charmed position as Tony Stark’s well-supplied heir apparent, Peter elected to have the world’s memory of him erased for the greater good, leaving him the unlucky, financially struggling figure that made him Marvel’s ultimate underdog.
At first, Destin Daniel Cretton’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day follows through with the idea of resetting the scale of Peter’s adventures. Without a support network, Peter at last feels like “your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man,” doing battle with common criminals and a classic Spidey villain in the form of Mac Gargan, a.k.a. Scorpion (Michael Mando), newly escaped from prison after being apprehended by Spider-Man in Watts’s Spider-Man: Homecoming.
Throughout the film, Cretton demonstrates a firmer grasp of action direction than he did in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Peter’s skirmishes are more interesting and lucid than they have been in previous franchise installments, with the shots lasting long enough for us to follow the full arc of one of Spider-Man’s web swings or his acrobatic, quick-reflexed maneuvers. And in Brand New Day’s quieter moments, following Peter as he longs for his loved ones who no longer remember him, Cretton films New York apartments and rooftops with a lived-in intimacy that recalls his 2013 sophomore feature Short Term 12.
So engaging are these scenes that it’s almost unfortunate when the plot fully kicks in and Peter must deal simultaneously with new, destabilizing manifestations of his spider mutation and a mysterious enemy who can possess others and hop from body to body in search of something held by a local task force for containing metahuman threats. The film teases out the unnerving quality of this villain for its first half, leaving them unseen and experienced only through the disturbing sight of unwitting hosts jerked around in Spider-Man’s vicinity and taunting him.
The eventual identity reveal, though, highlights an issue that’s plagued all of the MCU Spidey movies: Peter, as a consequence of the spotlight cast on various cameos and new characters making their MCU debuts, too often feels like a supporting player in his own solo features. Even in the film’s first half, when Peter encounters the Punisher (Jon Bernthal) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), no sooner is the big bad revealed than the movie switches focus to delve into their backstory at such length that it’s easy to forget who the ostensible protagonist is.
The second half’s action sequences, in part due to their reliance on CGI, also lose the carefully ordered lucidity of the earlier ones. Cretton still pulls off some fine moments, most notably in a scene involving the Hulk that really emphasizes that nightmarish quality of his that’s been unseen on screen for about a decade. On the flip side, a climactic battle that’s meant to show how much Peter has mastered his new mutations turns into incomprehensible mush, with too much camera movement and editing obscuring relatively simple motions.
The true climax of the film, though, isn’t a violent showdown but a remarkably quiet rapprochement between hero and villain that relies not on Spider-Man’s physical strength but on his moral fortitude. Peter’s greatest asset as a character has always been his relatability, his fundamental normalcy despite the bizarreness of his superpowers.
Too often in the MCU, Peter seems to exist only to set up the arcs of other characters’ stories, leaving the emotional impact of his struggles and losses effectively neutered. The same is often true in Brand New Day, but in appealing to the antagonist’s humanity, he finally gets to fully demonstrate his own. For the first time in his current screen iteration, Spider-Man seems like what he is in the comics: the beating heart of Marvel and its most compelling figure.
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