Spider-Man: Brand New Day review – back at street level, where he belongs

I’ve had a few days to sit with Spider-Man: Brand New Day now, and it hasn’t slipped. It’s the best film of the Tom Holland era and the most Spider-Man-like of the four.

Holland has spent a decade attached to portals and universe-ending events. This is the first time we’ve seen him at street level, in Queens, dealing with people. Destin Daniel Cretton picks Peter up four years after the spell at the end of No Way Home wiped him from everyone’s memory, and spends 145 minutes on what that cost him. The villains are the weakest part of it. They’re a small price for what the film does with everything else.

Tom Holland has never been better as Peter Parker

The scene that tells you what this film is doing has no action in it at all. Peter sits alone in a drab apartment watching Ned and MJ’s videos from MIT, living his old life through a screen, watching two people who don’t remember he exists. He’s written MJ a letter he hasn’t sent, and he keeps it close.

It’s a hard watch, and it should be. Cretton lets it sit rather than cutting away to something louder, and Holland plays it without reaching for anything.

That’s the version of Peter this film is interested in. He’s lonely in an ordinary and relatable way, a man in his mid-twenties with nobody to turn to. Ten years into the role, this is the first script that has asked Holland for stillness, and he’s excellent in it. Everything the film does later leans on those early quiet stretches, and it’s why the reunions land as hard as they do when they finally arrive.

Michael Giacchino scored it by taking his own Homecoming theme apart, stripping notes out of it to match a life with pieces missing. “I want to make a sad Spider-Man movie,” he said at Comic-Con, and he has.

The film knows all of this about itself before the first set piece arrives, which is rarer in this run than it should be. Some of that is down to timing. Holland’s role in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey forced Sony to move Spider-Man, and the delay bought roughly six months of development that Cretton came in and used. “The Odyssey almost saved Spider-Man because we wouldn’t have had Destin,” as Holland put it. You can see where that time went. The film establishes what it’s about long before it starts throwing anyone through a wall.

Jon Bernthal’s Punisher is the best thing this run has added

Bernthal has played Frank Castle since 2016, through two Netflix runs, Daredevil: Born Again and this year’s Disney+ special The Punisher: One Last Kill. He arrives here with all of it intact and none of it softened for a 12A.

Cretton has been clear about the job Castle is doing: “the point of the Punisher being in this movie is to be a little bit of a warning sign for Spidey, and the journey that he could go down if he’s not careful.” That’s what Frank is. He’s the loner in the hideout, the man who chose to disappear, and he’s a picture of where Peter ends up if the isolation wins.

He’s also the closest person to a friend Peter has, which makes him the most dependable relationship Peter has in the film. Brand New Day holds Frank up as the cautionary tale and then quietly makes him the friend. Both are true at once, and the film is comfortable with that.

They start at odds. Frank wants to do it his way, Peter wants to do it the Spider-Man way, and they’re never truly against each other. It plays like siblings arguing rather than enemies circling.

Then it gets funny. The morning after Peter brings MJ to the hideout, he sits there drinking coffee with the mask still on, and Frank pulls him on it. It’s a comic beat in a film carrying a lot of weight, and that’s exactly its job. Peter’s natural buoyancy keeps resurfacing between the heavier stretches, and the Frank scenes are where it comes back most often. The film needs that lift and knows when to reach for it.

Some of the ease between them is real. Bernthal and Holland have been friends for a decade and made each other’s Marvel audition tapes while shooting Pilgrimage in Ireland in 2016. “I made his Spider-Man audition tape. He made my Punisher audition tape when we were in Ireland doing a movie,” Bernthal said this year. Ten years on, they’re the best double act in the film.

The action is the best of the four, the villains the weakest

The fighting is practical in a way this run hasn’t been before, and a chunk of it came off a PlayStation controller. Holland told IGN at the premiere that “a lot of those finishing moves, a lot of our stuff was influenced by that stuff”, meaning Insomniac’s games. Cretton’s stunt team screenshotted their favourite moves and took them into the writers’ room to work out which could be built for real. The Jackie Chan Stunt Team did the building, with Peng Zhang as fight coordinator and second unit director, reuniting with Cretton after Shang-Chi.

Cretton also put Spider-Man back on wires, which is a flat rejection of his predecessor’s advice. Jon Watts, who directed the previous three, said publicly: “It doesn’t look good when someone is just swinging on a rope. It’s boring. It looks dumb. Don’t waste your time. That’s my advice to the next Spider-Man director.” Cretton ignored him and the film is better for it. You can feel the weight of a body on the end of a line in a way you couldn’t before.

The comic cover recreations are the most purely enjoyable stretch in the film for comic book fans.

Which makes it a shame that the villains are the one part of the film left underfed. Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey works mostly through psychic control of other people, and while that’s efficient as a plot engine, it flattens the drama. An antagonist operating through proxies doesn’t get many scenes of her own, and the confrontations start to resemble each other. Sink is good with what she’s given, particularly once the search for her sister comes into focus.

The knock-on hits two characters who deserved better. Mando’s Mac Gargan has been waiting since Homecoming in 2017 for something to do and spends this film taking instructions. Marvin Jones III makes his live-action debut as Tombstone, a character he voiced in Into the Spider-Verse, and gets almost nothing to play. Both are set-up rather than payoff.

None of that sinks it, because the tension here was never going to come from who Peter was fighting. It comes from whether he can hold onto himself while he does it.

Which is why the beat that stayed with me is the one during the fight with the Hand. Peter takes his inhibitor out, stops holding back and hits far harder, and in the same movement webs the wall behind his attackers so they land in webbing instead of being impaled.

That’s the film in one image. He accepts what the arachnid side of him is becoming and refuses to let it cost him the part that’s Peter Parker. He’s both, and he won’t trade one for the other. It’s one of the most emotional moments in a film full of them, and a properly good fight scene at the same time.

Should you watch it?

Yes.

If you like Spider-Man, and particularly if you’ve wanted one of these films to slow down and stay with the character, this is the one.

You’ll need to have seen No Way Home. The whole premise rests on its ending and the film doesn’t stop to catch you up. Homecoming and Far From Home add useful context, particularly for Mac Gargan’s Scorpion, but you’ll manage without them. If you want the full run first, our ranking of every Spider-Man movie is a decent map.

On format, there’s no UK IMAX release, so that option is off the table. I saw it in 4DX at my local Cineworld and had a great time with it, and the practical stunt work suits the format. ScreenX uses dedicated side-panel footage captured during production rather than added afterwards, which is a real first, though early viewer reactions to it are mixed. A standard screen with a good sound system is a solid option as well.

Stay to the very end. There’s no mid-credits scene, and the only one there is plays after the full crawl. We’ve broken that down separately in our post-credits explainer.

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