“Spider-Man: Brand New Day”
(USA/Canada/UK/Germany)
Metacritic (6/10), Letterboxd (3/5), Imdb.com (6/10), TMDB.com (6/10), Imdb critics review
#BrentMarchant #SpiderManBrandNewDay #TomHolland #Zendaya #DestinDanielCretton #MarkRuffalo #SadieSink #FlorencePugh #superhero #actionadventure #MarvelUniverse #NewYork #crimefighter #PeterParker
When I watch a movie, I expect to be entertained, enlightened and/or informed (not necessarily in that order or all at once). But what I don’t want is to be treated like a marketing prospect. And that, unfortunately, is one of the problems with many of the releases in the Marvel Universe, including this latest installment in the Spider-Man franchise. Given the studio’s intricate web of properties (no pun intended) in this overlapping assortment of superhero franchises, there are considerable character and storyline cross-overs in virtually all of its film projects. Now, because of that, some cross-pollination of the narratives is bound to occur. But, when this practice becomes a key element in developing the plots of these offerings, it begins to feel more like marketing manipulation than bona fide storytelling, as is the case here. I don’t particularly appreciate using existing efforts to purposely promote upcoming productions. It tends to make these movies somewhat formulaic and cookie-cutter in nature. And, even though that’s not carried to an extreme in this release, it’s present nevertheless, no matter how much director Destin Daniel Cretton may try to enliven whatever other distinguishing characteristics might have been incorporated into the script. In essence, the film continues the current Spider-Man mythology with protagonist Peter Parker (Tom Holland) working largely as a solo undercover crimefighter in New York going after bad guys in a world where he and his past accomplishments have been intentionally forgotten as part of a selfless protective initiative. Only he retains recollection of what came before, leaving him alone where this knowledge is concerned, since old colleagues, including his onetime love interest, M.J. (Zendaya), retain no personal memory of him. It causes him a certain sense of emotional weariness, but it’s also something that he doesn’t have the luxury of time to focus on, given his workload and the fact that he’s going through transformations of his own while battling a menacing new nemesis (Sadie Sink). True, he secures some assistance from past superhero kindreds (Mark Ruffalo, Florence Pugh), but they don’t remember him either, compromising their effectiveness. Can he overcome all of these challenges? That’s a question as much for viewers as it is for Spidey himself, given that, in telling this story, multiple narrative threads are introduced (and not especially clearly), a problem that plagues the flow of the material in the opening half. This could potentially hamper viewer understanding until the picture’s back end, when it finally finds a firmer footing to tell its tale (even if some of it isn’t always adequately explained). Judicious editing may have helped here, but then that may have meant trimming some of the marketing material for future releases (and we can’t have that now, can we?). In short, “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is probably best seen as a mediocre Marvel offering that features some modestly entertaining enhanced character development but that nevertheless covers a lot of action-adventure ground we’ve already seen before in countless other studio releases and that could certainly use some shrewd pruning of its overlong 2:24:00 runtime, too. Diehard fans of the franchise will no doubt love this (or virtually anything else that Marvel chooses to put up on the screen) no matter what, but I can’t help but take issue with that assessment. After all, there’s quite an undeniable irony here in the bold wording of the film’s title, which would seem to promise something new but doesn’t follow through on that pledge as well as it might have.