Spider-Man: Brand New Day 3 ½ stars
One of the most highly anticipated movies of the year appeared this month in the form of Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Tom Holland takes on this iconic MCU role for the fourth time of this iteration of the webslinger (there being two earlier iterations this century and that doesn’t include the popular Spider-Verse movies). Previously, you might recall from Spider-Man: No Way Home, that Spider-Man had to erase the knowledge of his identity as Peter Parker from the memories of his closest friends, MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon), and anyone else with close contact with him. Thus, Peter is left completely alone with no one to confide in. His closest acquaintance seems to be the police detective named DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas of The Bear) who he talks to over the phone between catching bad guys. Besides this, Spider-Man is experiencing hormonal imbalances from the arachnid hormones in his bloodstream, causing mutations to occur, so he is really displeased with his situation. He spends much time tinkering with gadgets to control hormone inhibitors. (By the way, that is the voice of Naomi Watts as Peter Parker’s digital companion.) There is a lot else going on besides Spider-Man’s personal problems here. Filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton, directing his first Spider-Man movie has packed a long and complicated plot into this story including crossovers, relationships with other MCU Superheroes, and what seems to be another superhero origin story. So much so, that at times I wondered if this was just Spider-Man’s story or a marketing ploy for future MCU movies. (The theater showed a trailer for The Avengers: Doomsday, so you can bet that the Spider-Man movies serve as a set up for that one.) We get an introduction to the government agency, Damage Control, a sort of super police force set up to counter threats from supervillains. It is led by William Metzger (Tramell Tilman of Severance), a corporate bureaucrat type who may have something to hide. Early on Spider-Man is confronted by a mysterious criminal mastermind who has made repeated attempts to break into Damage Control headquarters to find something that is very valuable hidden there. This evil genius has the ability to instantly transfer their consciousness from one person to another, read the subject’s thoughts and control their actions. Thus, they are nearly impossible to stop. But since this mind control does not work on Spider-Man, he is the only hope to stop this sinister threat. Fortunately, he is able to enlist the help of Frank Castle, a.k.a. The Punisher (Jon Bernthal), Bruce Banner a.k.a. Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Yelena Belova a.k.a. Black Widow (Florence Pugh). But they are not always as helpful as needed. The usual extended action scenes with extreme damage to New York City and plenty of web swinging across the urban landscape are there. I think that Cretton has way overdone the drama, the pining over MJ and the interconnecting storylines with other superheroes. Don’t be surprised if future crossovers extend to the X-Men. I hope I’m not giving anything away!