Strong acting and low-key sensibilities help Spider-Man: Brand New Day swing high

In 2006, directors Lowell Frank and future Marvel Cinematic Universe staple Destin Daniel Cretton helmed the documentary Drakmar: A Vassal's Journey. The feature chronicled a teenage boy immersing himself in fantasy role-play to escape the horrors of his existence. Such duality would come to define Cretton’s filmmaking fascinations. In Short Term 12, he explored the nuanced interior lives of at-risk teens often defined just by their mental health struggles. The Glass Castle chronicled a woman grappling with both the toxicity and positivity she associated with her father.

Maybe that means Cretton was always destined to make a Spider-Man movie. After all, from the moment he first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 in August 1962, Spidey’s always been about dueling interior urges. Can Peter Parker juggle a normal life and Spider-Man duties? Can he handle this great power and its equally immense responsibilities? Cretton’s experience with similar material and intimate drama serves Spider-Man: Brand New Day remarkably well.

Spidey’s on his own. In the wake of everyone forgetting who Peter Parker is at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home, this web-crawler is living a cramped, lonely existence. He’s taking down every costumed baddie imaginable in New York City. However, in his everyday civilian life, Parker’s living alone in a dusty apartment attic. His best buddy Ned (Jacob Balaton) and former lover MJ (Zendaya) are off at MIT and have no memory of this web-crawler’s secret identity. "I'm doin' it the best I can, living on nobody but me," as the Just the Ten of Us theme song once harmonized.

Dealing with D-list foes like Boomerang and Tarantula alone is one thing. However, soon a new telepathic foe begins wrecking havoc in the Big Apple. Damage Control, and its leader, Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), are totally perplexed. Spidey wants to help, but this rival’s presence intersects with some strange new occurrences in Peter Parker’s body making it difficult for him to do basic Spider-Man tasks. This is where Spider-Man: Brand New Day reveals itself a tale of duality and what defines “monstrousness” in a person.  

There’s a low-key scene late in Spider-Man: Brand New Day that evoked a strong “awwwww” from me. No, Brand New Day didn’t pause for some adorable pugs (though I wouldn’t have minded such obvious Lisa fan-service). Instead, it was a wistful character beat firmly rooted in Tom Holland’s prior Spider-Man adventures. Both this sequence’s effectiveness and its relative intimacy speak to Cretton and screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers never forgetting the characters throughout Brand New Day.

Granted, that does mean the plot they’ve conjured up here doesn’t reinvent the wheel. Opting for a familiar narrative outline to hang specific character beats on has its disadvantages. Certain “plot twists” are easy to see coming. Meanwhile, frustrating expository dialogue stumbles certain images that would work infinitely better as purely visual storytelling. Thankfully, the script also offers plenty of amiable charms, including its more confined scope. There’s no need for gigantic beams of light shooting up into the sky or whatever was going on in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Just chill. Let these talented actors flourish.

And flourish they do. Though he’s ten years older than when we first saw him in Captain America: Civil War, Tom Holland still wields an endearing underdog quality truly making him feel outmatched by any foe he comes across. That's not the only skill he brings to this role. Spider-Man has the ability to crawl up walls. However, Holland’s also got a super-power of his own: creating crackling chemistry with any MCU staple he’s paired up with. Following his fun rapport with Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch in past Spider-Man entries, this actor’s a riot bouncing off Jon Benrthal’s Frank Castle/The Punisher. Constant stints in this red-and-blue super-suit haven’t diminished Holland’s acting chops first established in titles like The Impossible years ago.

Holland leads a commendably solid cast that also includes Zendaya reaffirming why she's one of the better leading ladies of her generation. Even in a CG and superhero-dominated blockbuster, Zendaya's gripping and especially excels in her most aching sequences against Holland. Meanwhile, Bernthal’s an amusing crotchety contrast to Holland’s lead character and Sadie Sink also excels portraying a mysterious new character. No spoilers here, but Sink’s handling of her role’s rawest material is quite potent. See all that humanity, Darren Aronofsky? That’s why your Sadie Sink character in The Whale never worked.

All these laudable performances materialize under filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton's direction. Happily, he and cinematographer Brett Pawlak bring liveliness to the visuals, including a welcome emphasis on camera movement. Cretton’s camera following Parker plunging off rooftops in unbroken images (rather than just cutting around this action in a string of shots) lends energetic exhilaration to this web-crawler’s swinging escapades. A similar willingness to let shots breathe also aids set pieces like a striking early depiction of that telepathic adversary's abilities.

As a cherry on top, Cretton’s sturdy hand with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ various fight scenes resurfaces here. Any of the hand-to-hand Spider-Man skirmishes look terrific, especially a climactic duel between this hero and some The Hand ninjas.

In terms of colorful backgrounds, Brand New Day is more of a mixed bag. There’s more specificity to several sets, including the ramshackle boat Frank Castle calls home. An assortment of quasi-noir-ish nighttime shots where a forlorn Spidey is illuminated by crackling neon signs are also memorable. Unfortunately, some of the grey color grading plaguing other MCU outings like Thunderbolts* is also a problem here. Third-act exterior shots of Roosevelt Island, for instance, rob the location of any vibrancy. The interior of Damage Control’s main building, meanwhile, lacks visual idiosyncrasies.

Such drab shortcomings stand out since Spider-Man: Brand New Day otherwise happily embraces comic book silliness. If you can have a movie where Spider-Man fights a bunch of ninjas, why not? Ditto for a showdown between this web-crawler and The Hulk. There’s also a well-realized set piece involving Brand New Day’s antagonist telepathically “hopping” from one random New Yorker to another, similarly thriving on comic book tomfoolery. These bombastic tendencies even seem to have inspired the vibrant super-suit Spider-Man waltzes around in.

Man, I love this outfit. The uber-bright colors. The textures on the web lines across his chest. The black circles around the eyes, everything looks fantastic. Costume designer Sanja Milkovic Hays and her crew should take a bow. Finally, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 no longer houses the best live-action Spider-Man costume.

Combining these outlandish elements with the effective small-scale character drama makes for a mighty enjoyable moviegoing experience. Not a sublime one on par with Spider-Man 2, the two Spider-Verse masterpieces, or this year’s best big-budget voyages (like The Odyssey or Project Hail Mary). What needs grand theatricality (like Michael Giacchino’s sweeping and sometimes downtrodden score) gets it in abundance. Meanwhile, Short Term 12 veteran Destin Daniel Cretton doesn’t forget the people (including mighty effective glimpses into everyday New York) necessary to make the theatricality worth caring about. Like I said, Spidey's "doin' it the best I can, livin’ on nobody but me." Leaning on that reality underpins Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s greatest strengths.