By Dan Skip Allen

I’ve read thousands of Spider-man comic books in my day. There have been plenty of them I have loved and almost as many that I haven’t liked. Comic books are different from movies, though. Each month, two or three new ones come out to continue what they already started or start/end something that has come before or something new. That’s the nature of the beast. Movies, on the other hand, only come around every couple of years. In the case of Spider-man, there have been five live-action movies from Sony proper and three as part of a collaboration with Disney/ Marvel Studios. Eight all total with three more appearances in other MCU films. Sony has also released two parts of their planned “Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse” movies. Combined for a grand total of thirteen Spider-Man movies on the big screen to date. Like most films I like some and I don’t like others. In the case of “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” I didn’t like it. A new day doesn’t always burn the brightest. Sometimes, it can be dark, and that’s the case here. 

When film fans left Peter Parker/Spider-man (Tom Holland) off in “Spider-man:No Way Home”he asked Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase the memories of everyone on earth, so they didn’t know who he was behind the mask. Especially his two closest friends Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) and MJ (Michelle Jones) (Zendaya), who was his girlfriend at the time. Now Spider-man/Peter Parker is leading a mundane life fighting crime in New York City and working on his technology in his little ramshackle apartment. He understands this is the way. To steal a line from The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal. He fights villains like The Scorpion (Michael Mando), Tombstone (Krondon), Turantula, and The Hand, a Japanese Samurai Gang. to name a handful. He reports to New York City Police Detective Jean Dewolf (Liza Colon-Zayas) on his progress via phone calls. When a mysterious new villain who takes over the minds of innocent New Yorkers to attack various Damage Control sites in the city Spider-man/Peter Parker teams up with known vigilante The Punisher?Frank Castle (Jon Berthall) to protect those he cares about and the inhabitants of the big apple as a whole.

To start my analysis of this film, I will have to say that there is a lot of Spider-man action in this film. Spider-man swings through New York a lot in this movie, and there are a lot of battles between characters like The Punisher/Frank Castle, The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and other throwaway rentacops Fans that have wanted more action scenes and Spidey flying through the streets of New York are going to get what they paid for in this new installment of the character. A lot of these scenes aren’t exactly perfect, though, as the CGI isn’t finished. You can see how, in certain scenes, the visual effects are lacking, especially involving the Hulk sequence and some other Spidey battle scenes. This has been a problem with some of the MCU films in the past. I remember Destin Daniel Cretton’s Shang Chi movie not having the best CGI towards the end of the film, and Dr. Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was another example of subpar GCI. So this is par for the course with some of these movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe lately.

I remember the whole thing that was going around after the last trilogy of Spider-man movies ended, and a lot of people said they wanted a more grounded Spider-man/Peter Parker. Well, you do get a bit of that with a psychological type story. In the Spider-man comic, this character always had a crisis of conscience regarding his place in the world and whether or not he was cut out for doing the work of a superhero or not. That’s the basic gist of the story here as well. Right from the beginning, you have Peter mopping around his apartment and going into a diner where MJ works, getting a cup of coffee trying to give her a letter he wrote explaining who he is. He ends up not giving her the letter and goes back to his pretty miserable life if you will. Being a superhero is the only thing he has going for himself, but even that is difficult for him in this new adult version. He sees his friends enjoying themselves at MIT in Boston and wishes he could be there. If your looking for a more mature character driven version of the character this is it, there are other issues that bring the overall film down for me.I have always resonated with this character, but some of the decisions that Cretton made with the story are problems I have with the film.

First of all is the length. The film clocks in at 2 hrs 25 minutes, and I feel that was at least 15 to 20 minutes too long. It drags after the first sequence introducing the character and his new world he is living in. Once the protagonist is introduced, the movie slows down to a snail’s pace. The action scenes keep it interesting at times, but the main protagonist is something that bothered me quite a bit. I understand the idea that Peter is alone and wants friends to enjoy life. I could relate to that idea the film is trying to sell me on. The villain is misused, and I was baffled by why they used this character in the first place. I didn’t care about the protagonists’ motivations, and they bogged the film down for me. I wish Cretton just used one of any number of Spider-man rogues gallery villains instead of shoehorning in this specific character. I don’t think it worked for the story, and they made for a more boring overall film. Despite what I said about the action sequences. This Spider-man felt soulless a lot of the times, and that’s different from the previous three in this franchise.

The cast of the movie was fine with a few returning characters like MJ, Ned, The Scorpion and so forth but there were new characters in these films like The Punisher, The Hulk/Bruce Banner and Jeane Dewolf. They all added a different element to the story in their own way. Tremell Tillman plays a new character, the head of Damage Control William Metzger, he’s a bit of a bad guy. The million dollar question is who Sadie Sink (Stranger Things) is playing. That is revealed here, but to me, it’s a letdown because I felt it took away from the main storyline. Her character took focus from the main plot, which to me should have been the character development of Peter. Holland’s interactions with Bernthall’s Frank Castle were some of the best scenes for me. He also had some good scenes with Zendaya as well. As a whole, the cast was fine, but it was that one character played by Sink I could have done without. This could have been another character from my humble opinion.

One thing I wanted to say about being alone is that it isn’t always fun to be by yourself. I had a life where I went out partying and doing crazy fun things and enjoying my life with others. It was what happened the next day that I  regretted doing the things I did. I find loneliness to be a penitence in a way for all the mistakes I’ve made in the past. Regarding the character of Peter, I feel he needed this time alone to reflect on his life. The decisions he made were for the better good. That’s the part of the film that worked the most for me. I wanted to see more of that reflection on his life and pay the price by being alone and not having love and friendship. These aspects weren’t dealt with as much as they should have been by the script. Instead, it went in another direction I wasn’t that interested in. 

Overall, there were a few good aspects of “Spider-man: Brand New Day”, but for the most part, this film was a letdown for me. I know Cretton and company were going for a different vibe, but they sacrificed what fans and viewers of these movies loved the most about them. That is that they were fun action-packed teen angst adventure movies. We could relate to the teen aspects. The adult stuff here was fine, but I don’t think it was handled all that well. I’ve read thousands of Spider-man comic books, and there were much better stories in the comics that handled the various existential crises that Spider-man/Peter Parker has gone through in his existence. This movie isn’t terrible by any means, it’s a step down from the previous films in the franchise and in fact I think its the worst appearance Tom Holland and company have given as these characters to date. I genuinely go into every movie with the expectation that I want to love them, and when I walked out of this one, I was just confused and bewildered by what I had just watched. It didn’t remind me of why I loved this character so much ever since I was a kid. I just thought about how bad the film I just watched was. And that’s not a good thing for any movie, let alone one I had high hopes for. I don’t mind a darker, more character driven story with Spider-man, but this wasn’t at the level I had come to expect from Kevin Feige and Amy Pascal lately with this character. 

🌟 🌟 stars