This past week, I’ve had a dull, throbbing ache in my head. It gets distractingly painful at times, and I was worried about the aftereffects of waking up early on Friday, heading out to the local cinema, putting on 3D glasses and watching Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Surprisingly, I felt about the same leaving the cinema as I did entering it. The only plausible explanation is that my body doesn’t differentiate between a MCU Spider-Man film and a dull, throbbing ache.
Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is having headaches too. Some are literal. His new mutations, which give him enhanced powers but also make him snap into a less wholesome version of himself, are a physical strain. Some, though, are emotional, the fallout of Dr Strange’s spell at the end of No Way Home (2021), which protects the multiverse by erasing Peter from everyone's memory. He now lives on his own, sadly keeping tabs on MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) at MIT, throwing himself into crimefighting to such an extent that detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) is more worried than grateful for his help.
If Marvel had any headaches heading into this film, they would’ve been of an existential nature. Four movies in, what can their Spider-Man offer as a character besides more smooth success? This has been an extremely successful and unrelentingly bland sub-franchise within the MCU; Destin Daniel Cretton does little more than Jon Watts, director of the first three films, to impose any kind of personality on the latest instalment. Holland remains a lightly likeable but uninteresting lead, well-suited for a series that’s frictionless to a fault. He’s one of the few Marvel stars who needs them as much as they need him.
The last film, No Way Home, ran on the shameless nostalgia of Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Peters teaming up with Holland (a test run for the elaborate multiverse narratives that'll dominate Avengers: Doomsday, out in December). No Spidey-centric multiverse narrative would ever top that, and Brand New Day drops the concept entirely. It offers, instead, a pared-down story, albeit with drop-ins from other ongoing sub-franchises—Florence Pugh's Yelena turns up for a few forced comic scenes, Mark Ruffalo amiably collects another paycheque from a studio that’s never understood how to use him, and Jon Bernthal as the trigger-happy Frank Castle does an egregious parody of a New Yorker.
There’s some poetic resonance in Peter removing himself voluntarily from everyone’s memory while his latest adversary hops unbidden into people’s minds. This mysterious telepath—a character moviegoers of my generation will recognise—is particularly interested in the Department of Damage Control, which polices supernatural threats. Its head, Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), tells Spider-Man that a large part of their work is figuring out how to control and then deploy the superpowers of individuals they’ve apprehended. Spider-Man’s too much of a team player to read anything sinister in this, yet the tenor of Metzger’s little speech indicates, before it becomes clear, the new sub-franchise this film is laying the ground for.
Cretton directed Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), and he brings some of the crisp choreography of that film to this. One of the neater tricks in Brand New Day is the telepath ‘jumping’ from person to person, which is executed like experimental theatre, one body after another freezing and seizing. But even this possession is PG; imagine the wicked fun Sam Raimi, director of the Tobey Maguire Spidey films, might’ve had instead. I hoped Cretton, having made a martial arts film, might do something with renegade outfit The Hand. They look incredible with their swords, masks and red robes, but apart from one tantalizingly cool shot with no corresponding scene, and an unsatisfying fight late in the film, they’re a big waste of ninja.
As a relatively moody and sparse Spider-Man film, it might be tempting to assume Brand New Day is attempting something new. Yet, this remains a series without any kind of edge. The telepath’s origin story is remarkably trite (not the actor’s fault). MJ is barely a character after four films. The Hulk, The Punisher, Yelena… are exactly where they were before. It's almost Faustian that Marvel's blandest series is money in the bank as long as it remains unchallenging. If the brief for this film was ‘don’t do anything dramatic in the run-up to Doomsday’, then mission accomplished. Brand new day, same old.
‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ is in theatres.
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