SPIDERMAN: BRAND NEW DAY Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Destin Daniel Cretton
Stars: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jacob Batalon, Tramell Tillman, Sadie Sink, Jon Bernthal, Mark Ruffalo, Marisa Tomei, Liza Colon-Zayas, Florence Pugh, Naomi Watts, Michael Mando, Zabryna Guevara, Marvin Jones III, Eman Esfandi.
Spiderman has always been the most consistent and most enjoyable franchise within the canon of Marvel superhero movies. Brand New Day, which continues on from No Way Home, offers up a darker vision for our favourite webslinging superhero. Director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, etc) takes over the reins for the first new Spiderman movie in five years and injects a darker vision into the material.
At the end of No Way Home, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) had wiped out the memories of everyone, including his best friends MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon, again providing plenty of nerdy humour), but he is struggling to deal with the consequences of that decision alone. The world at large seems to have forgotten about him, but he rebuilds his image as the saviour of New York. He works with New York detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colon-Zayas, from tv series The Bear, etc) to take down a number of criminals in the city. He covertly keeps an eye on his former friends.
But Spiderman is suffering as his mutant spider DNA is causing bouts of rage he seems unable to control. He seeks help from Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to find a way to control the inhibitor device that controls his spider-like abilities.
Spiderman also works with William Metzger (Tramell Tillman, from tv series Severance, etc), the head of the Department of Damage Control, which is under attack from a mysterious entity that is trying to crack its security.
But then he encounters the powerful new threat in Jean Grey (Sadie Sink, from The Whale, etc) who possesses strong mental powers. She is able to get inside everybody’s head space and possess them briefly to abet her in her mission. She is also able to psychically “leap” from one person to another. She is on a mission to find her sister who was abducted by Metzger, who wanted to harness her own strong mind controlling powers for his own nefarious purposes. Jean is yet another of those Spiderman villains who also seem to have been a victim, making them more sympathetic.
Spiderman: Brand New Day deals with some potent themes of family, friendship, connections, abandonment and grief and trauma and, of course, power and responsibility which gives the material more of a grounding in real world issues that makes it more personal and intimate. Cretton and regular series writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers manage to shoehorn in other Marvel characters including the vigilante The Punisher (Jon Bernthal) and The Hulk.
The film has been shot in a darker colour palette by Cretton’s regular cinematographer Brett Pawlak (Just Mercy, etc), who brings the streets and high rise buildings of New York alive. There are some impressively staged action set pieces including a car chase through the streets of New York, bolstered by some great state of the art CGI effects.
Holland now brings a harder and more cynical edge to his characterisation and gone is that eager and youthful enthusiasm and energy he brought to the role in the first couple of films. His character seems a bit more battered and bruised (both emotionally and physically) here and Holland manages to convey his conflicted feelings. He and Bernthal establish a great dynamic that drives their complicated relationship. Bernthal provides plenty of comic relief with his over-the-top scenery chewing performance as the Punisher. The chemistry between Holland and Zendaya (a couple in real life) is also palpable.
While entertaining enough I felt that this latest instalment in the Spiderman franchise fell short of the heights achieved by the previous film No Way Home, which managed to successfully bring together the two previous iterations of the character in Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. Still, Brand New Day manages to overcome the feeling of superhero movie fatigue that has begun to set in. However, with an overly generous running time of 145 minutes, the film seems unnecessarily bloated.
★★★
