Photo: Jay Maidment/Marvel/Columbia Pictures/Everett Collection
Tom Holland, like Peter Parker in the new Spider-Man movie, has been dealing with some growing pains. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the fourth film in the series, starts off by speeding through what would have been Peter’s college years to pick up with him in his early 20s, living off takeout in a cluttered top-floor apartment, alone ever since he was erased from everyone’s memory with a spell intended to salvage the multiverse or whatever. While his best friend, Ned (Jacob Batalon), and his girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya), went off to MIT for four years of STEM-centric undergraduate shenanigans, Peter remained behind, devoting himself to full-time crime-fighting while missing out on keggers and cramming for finals, his only real friend the detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), who is his NYPD contact. He has also, more awkwardly, been going through a spider puberty of sorts with surges of arachnid hormones sending his senses into overdrive, causing his wrists to sprout organic web slingers that render his old mechanical ones unusable and making him prone to fits of black-eyed aggression. This is, as a nature documentary playing in the background during a scene suggests, his equivalent of a spider molting, shedding its old exoskeleton to hopefully emerge — stronger and more resilient — into adulthood. But the movie, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and written by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, has no idea what that adulthood might look like.
Part of this is a Spider-Man problem — growing up has never entirely suited Peter Parker, who’s always felt most natural as some kind of student. But part of this is an issue with Holland, who’s risen to movie-star status on the strength of the Marvel character but who himself is teetering on the edge of a grown-up career that feels a lot less certain. Holland is now 30, an age he once cited to GQ as the limit on when he should still be playing the superhero, and married to his co-star Zendaya. He still has an irrepressibly boyish aura, but in close-ups, his face is unavoidably that of an adult. When Jon Bernthal’s Punisher, with whom Spider-Man is inexplicably paired up for this installment, growls, “I’m gonna kill that kid,” it’s a reminder that Holland also just spent The Odyssey playing a boy waiting to come of age while elsewhere in the same film actual children get enlisted into war. Timothée Chalamet is the same age but plays characters whose core tension is their desire to be taken seriously as men despite their youthfulness. Unlike him, Holland feels perched on the edge of the unknown — like the movies aren’t allowing him to grow up because they’re not sure what a grown-up Holland character entails.
He acquits himself adequately enough in Brand New Day, an otherwise bummer of a superhero outing that feels as stalled out as its main character, who’s utterly unsure of what’s next. While other movies in the genre have tried, with varying degrees of success, to fit their superpowered action into some sort of theme, this one is almost amusingly indifferent to subtext. Thunderbolts* — whose star Florence Pugh is easily the best part of this new movie in her selected scenes as the extravagantly accented Yelena Belova — was about depression, and the original X-Men movies positioned the treatment its mutants received as an allegory for homophobia. Brand New Day, on the other hand, is about how difficult it is to have superpowers. Not exactly relatable, but then it’s unclear whether this movie is aiming for human warmth, even as it spins its wheels plot-wise. A mysterious antagonist, portrayed by a hooded Sadie Sink, keeps launching attacks at the Department of Damage Control, a government agency that keeps tabs on the gifted and (super)talented. This telepath, whose identity amounts to a big ol’ (but entirely predictable if you’re still keeping tabs on the MCU) spoiler, has the ability to take control of the minds of others, leaping from body to body and using people to infiltrate DODC headquarters in search of something called “V-Max.”
Peter, as the only one immune to her mental hijacking, is tasked by Damage Control head Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman) to take her down. A film with more on its mind might have Peter be a little more skeptical of an organization that, in the last installment, arrested him and his friends. But Brand New Day is intensely obligated to Marvel’s unwieldy cinematic universe. When Bernthal’s and Holland’s characters bicker over an incident in the past on Staten Island, I had to go home and Google whether the two had actually met on the big or small screen before (they had not). The Punisher, brooding brutality tamped down to PG-13-friendly grouchiness, adds literally nothing to the plot, instead bringing the energy of an uncle you’d call to bail you out of jail but would never in a million years talk politics with. The presence of Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), whose Hulk-inhibiting device provides Peter with inspiration for a way to tackle his own issues, mostly serves to remind audiences that the character is still in the mix. Michael Mando reprises his Spider-Man: Homecoming role as minor villain Scorpion, while Marisa Tomei turns up in flashbacks as Aunt May.
At this point in our collective superhero experience, it’s strange to see such a major installment surrender so much of its run time to scaffolding for things to come. But watching Brand New Day feels like watching the work of a group of people who’ve forgotten what made these films so successful in the first place. It’s set in a New York that feels like a series of soundstages, sealed off and visually filtered in a way that matches the characters’ detachment from real-world concerns — in Peter’s case, from any mundane issues that might require him to have contact with regular folks, like a day job. It’s only over the credits that Cretton — who broke out over a decade ago with the tender, terrific Short Term 12 — is able to give us images with a sense of vibrancy to them, a montage of everyday snippets of New York street life that might as well be a whole other universe compared with what we just watched. It’s a universe where Holland might continue to have a career as an A-list leading man, but nothing in Brand New Day provides much of a case for that.
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