Historically rebooted more often than the virus-laden family computer, Spider-Man has spent the better part of two decades carrying a prodigious after-school workload born mostly of necessity. Sony Pictures had one superhero crown jewel in an era when a major studio showing up with fewer capes than a full-on flash mob looked positively underdressed.
Eventually, Sony had rebooted the broken record in-house enough times to realize audiences might enjoy some new fingerprints on it. So, in 2015, it invited Marvel Studios over to ensure there were officially too many cooks in the kitchen. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man debuted in Captain America: Civil War in 2016, followed by Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017, and the franchise got a healthy injection of that Marvel secret sauce before the stuff was eventually subject to an FDA recall.
The Holland installments were commendably not terrible. Some were considerably better than that. Still, by Brand New Day, I was prepared for the point where exhaustion finally set in and the arachnophobia took hold. There couldn’t possibly be anything left to wring from Peter Parker’s radioactive adolescence.
Just hang me in the first web Spider-Man successfully ejects and walk away.
Alas, enter the Punisher, our marvelously ironic savior from further punishment.
Jon Bernthal stomps into this PG-13 movie looking like he took a wrong turn out of a slasher film. His Frank Castle remains the human embodiment of what happens when anger management isn’t covered by your insurance plan, and every minute he’s onscreen gives Brand New Day exactly the shot of adult hostility this franchise could have used in about half of the last decade’s production meetings.
It helps because, just as its truth-in-advertising title suggests, Brand New Day is basically another Spider-Man reboot.
Except it isn’t.
This sort of “pre-owned” reboot has become something of a specialty at the Spider-Man used-car lot. For a while, studios could use the multiverse to reboot superhero franchises without having to endure the indignity of admitting they were rebooting them. But audiences are now fully onto the redo’s increasingly polyonymous aliases.
Brand New Day simply picks up after No Way Home has helpfully erased Peter Parker from everyone’s memory, stripped away most of his existing relationships, and dumped him back into New York with nothing but a costume, trauma, and several billion dollars in intellectual property riding on his continued employment.
Not a reboot? More of a precision lobotomy?
Worth a shot, I guess.
To the movie’s credit, it doesn’t waste our time reenacting the actual Spider-Man origin again. At this point, that would qualify as elder abuse. Ask the average American to name all 50 states and by number 43 he’s invented West Carolina. Ask what happened to Uncle Ben and suddenly the motherfucker has footnotes.
Instead, Peter’s latest identity crisis is existential. If nobody remembers Peter Parker, who exactly is Peter Parker?
It’s a fair question. And a relatable one, since the audience has been asking something similar for years, although ours is more along the lines of: which guy was Peter Parker the last time we checked?
We’ve spent 25 years tracking Peter Parkers with the administrative precision of parole officers.
Thankfully, Holland remains very good at this. His Peter is older, lonelier, and now essentially working full-time as Spider-Man, which mostly means the youthful wish-fulfillment has curdled into a gig-economy nightmare with considerably more blunt-force trauma.
When his powers begin changing—rebooting, if you will—in unsettling ways, just as an unseen threat starts hijacking bodies around New York and targeting the Department of Damage Control, Peter gets dragged into an increasingly crowded mess involving the Punisher, Bruce Banner, and four or five other Marvel company players I have since forgotten.
Zendaya and Jacob Batalon return as MJ and Ned. Mark Ruffalo gets another swing at Bruce Banner. Michael Mando finally gets some actual mileage out of Scorpion. Tramell Tillman brings his usual unnervingly competent bureaucratic energy as Damage Control chief Bill Metzger. And Sadie Sink turns up in a role Marvel would prefer you not Google before buying your popcorn.
There is also, because apparently nobody involved had a watch or superhuman time management, 145 minutes of this crowd taking their seats for the company photo.
An absurd amount of time to ask an adult to watch a spider do anything.
And yet, maddeningly, most of it works.
Director Destin Daniel Cretton gives the movie enough humanity that the corporate scaffolding doesn’t completely swallow it. Holland sells Peter’s isolation. Bernthal is terrific. The supporting cast is absurdly overqualified. And when the movie stops advertising future Marvel products long enough to concentrate on the miserable little guy behind the mask, it has an emotional center considerably sturdier than it has any right to.
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