Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Verdict: 4/5

How hyped was I? 4/5

I wasn’t a fan of No Way Home—too much fan service and nostalgia for my taste; a symptom, I think, of the bloated corporate MCU money-making machine. BUT: I absolutely love Spider-Man. For as long as I can remember I’ve read the comics, watched the TV shows, and seen the movies no matter what the reviews were. So, I was here for it.

Where’d I see it?

Landmark Atlantic Plumbing in Washington, D.C. Not my favorite venue in town (RIP E Street Cinema and the Uptown), but still a perfect spot for visiting our dear friends at All Souls Bar on 8th & T afterwards.

Prep

I watched every single Spider-Man film this side of 1999. This does not include Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter, or Morbius. I am a reasonable person.

What pulled me in?

Just about everything? I want to meet this film where it is, and that’s a space designed to make money for a Hollywood Studio system unconcerned with quality, only profit and how we can squeeze every last cent out of a moviegoing populace starved for joy and desperate for any kind of escape from our day-to-day. That being said: I find Tom Holland to be a pitch-perfect Peter Parker, and Zendaya—who is an absolute star—is probably the best iteration of MJ we’ve seen in any medium…ever. (Their chemistry, as a married couple in real-life, obviously does a lot of heavy lifting to this effect.) The action sequences are generally excellent (if not a touch rife with green-screen CGI), and I was particularly stoked to see Jon Bernthal show up as Frank Castle/The Punisher to provide the film with a real, beating, broken heart. His speech to Spider-Man towards the end of the second act, about loneliness—“You think this is a choice? Living like this is a lifestyle—is that what you think? Kid, this is a sentence. If I had one second, people I love were still breathing, you think I’d be hiding behind a mask? Think I’d pretend to be something I’m not? Acting like a Goddamn coward?”—is the kind of monologue we’ve heard in superhero movies before—about honor; about sacrifice and responsibility and regret; about the spiritual toll of this life and these choices—but Bernthal delivers it with such honesty and restraint, almost rushing through it, and in doing so imbues the moment with an organic immediacy we rarely see in contemporary action films. It’s the kind of performance that—in a different world, and possibly a different film—could generate some minor awards buzz—comedic, surprising, and completely natural to the cinematic universe (if you will.)

Where did it lose me?

I can’t say the same for Mark Ruffalo—of whom I’m usually a big fan—reprising his role as Bruce Banner/The Hulk. I found myself wondering what, exactly, he was doing in the film beyond providing exposition for the main emotional arc of the story—how do we determine which parts of ourselves are “good” versus “bad”—before suddenly retreading the post-Scarlet Witch rampage from Age of Ultron without maintaining any of the original’s intensity or emotional stakes. This second concern makes me want to give Ruffalo some grace: he isn’t phoning it in, he’s just not given anything to do beyond looking pleasantly lobotomized while discussing DNA inhibitors and how they relate to the plot. It’s probably his weakest performance since Michael Mann’s 2004 Collateral, and, much like that film, I can’t help but think it isn’t really his fault—his character simply exists in scenes designed as filler to contextualize the central thrust of the film’s action. I feel similarly about Sadie Sink as Jean Grey, although here I’m less inclined to let the filmmakers off quite so easily. Say what you will about Far From Home and its flaws: Jake Gyllenhaal as the villain was decidedly not one of them. While I don’t expect the same kind of manic, unhinged desperation from Sink and her character that we were gifted with Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio, I was certainly expecting…something—particularly given the character’s legacy and Famke Janssen’s iconic portrayal in 2003’s X2. As a performer, Sink is truly underutilized, relegated to sitting in parked cars and adjacent rooms while other actors recite some fairly stiff dialogue to Holland about the monster lurking inside Spider-Man. The lines she does get to deliver are rote, canned villain monologues that wouldn’t feel wrong coming from the mouth of any number of Marvel baddies during the past ten years the MCU has spent wandering through the desert. And this is the film’s main flaw—treating Jean Grey’s presence as a preamble to the December release of Avengers: Doomsday; losing sight of what separates the film from everything we’ve grown so tired of since, basically, 2016’s Civil War, and of what makes Brand New Day so generally refreshing and enjoyable.

Favorite shot:

This one goes to Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova sitting in the hot tub that serves as her office in Brighton Beach. Not only am I a huge Florence fan (I’ve encountered some Pugh hate out there in the world, which I feel is ill-advised and comes, in part, from a gross misunderstanding of the way certain literary devices in Greta Gerwig’s 2019 Little Women remake toy with our perception of time and memory—but I digress), but I also found it to be a pleasantly surprising cameo by an MCU character that felt organic and natural within the Spidey-world; something not beholden to fan-satisfaction and nostalgia like the MacGuire/Garfield appearances in No Way Home. Honorable mention to TV on the Radio’s “Wolf Like Me” leading us into the film’s opening act—an absolute fucken’ banger.