This was the first item of Marvel product this viewer had sat down with since last summer's forgotten-because-forgettable The Fantastic Four: First Steps, which may explain why I found the opening reels hard work to say the least. While setting Spidey (Tom Holland) on the trail of latest big bad Scorpion (Michael Mando), this script has also to engineer meetings between our friendly neighbourhood superhero and various ongoing corporate concerns, including - deep breath - Jon Bernthal as the latest iteration of gun-toting hardnut The Punisher (they've met before, apparently, although the last time I saw the Punisher on screen, he was played by the late Ray Stevenson); Florence Pugh's Slavic hacker Black Widow, standard-bearer for the so-called New Avengers; Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner a.k.a. Hulk; some roaming ninja-type people presumably recruited to keep the Asian market happy; and another, recognisable name, who is not of this immediate world (but soon will be). We might be reassured that Marvel is no longer trading in footnotes and instead returning to large-scale scaffolding projects, busily forward planning. (You feel the execs were only a heartbeat away from adding an excitable exclamation mark to that title. Brand new day!) Yet while these things are notionally action movies - being films that occupy the same coveted place in the summer release schedules as Beverly Hills Cop and Con Air did back in the day - they still can't get round to that action until the contractors have set in place the half-dozen other stories that will be following Brand New Day down the pipe; that's why these movies now run closer to three hours than two. Brand New Day is an action movie that's also a romance (the Peter/MJ business), a live-action cartoon (whenever things go crash), science fiction with a dash of body horror (latest concerns: Peter Parker's cortisone levels, and a villain who teleports between victims like the killer in the Denzel Washington vehicle Fallen), a teaser trailer for coming attractions, and an account of a superhero's identity crisis that is also a record of a film (and studio)'s own identity crisis. Maybe the above is what "something for everyone" looks like in 2026, but Brand New Day struck these eyes as crazy cluttered, and in a way that didn't entirely guarantee getting one's money's worth: individual elements tend to tread on each other's toes, or otherwise obstruct or occlude one another. (A crisp five-pound record token to the first reader who can tell me, without looking anything up, where Scorpion, the catalyst of all the film's chaos, is by the end of the picture. Better Call Saul breakout Mando seethes effectively in the role, but the character seems to vanish amid the chicanery, discarded like an old toy deemed surplus to playtime requirements. Ooh, look at these shiny new X-Men dolls!)
Still, the whole doesn't fully collapse under the weight of all this folderol, and that may be down to incoming director Destin Daniel Cretton, one of a number of former indie tyros recruited as grist to the Marvel mill. Like Watts before him, Cretton seeks out valuable pockets of space for his actors, and really does appear invested in these characters as people rather than pieces to be shuffled around a board or screen. (They're not always so apparent during the flurries of falling masonry, but in the quieter scenes, traces of this director's sensitive, intimate breakthrough Short Term 12 persist.) There are even occasional flickers of a slightly more adult Spider-Man, if such a thing isn't a contradiction in terms. Holland spends much more time with his top off than he did in the Watts era, Frank Punisher (gay porn name, if ever there was) lets fly with half of the Oedipal expletive before Spidey silences him with a mouthful of web, and the narrative has one good, cruel trick up its sleeve in having Zendaya's Mary-Jane possessed by Scorpion at exactly the moment Peter believes she's come back to him of her own accord. The pity is that this possession lasts for all of five minutes before the franchise moves on to the next cameo, the next setpiece and thereby reverts to the series status quo. Raimi, operating under his own steam, might well have made something more of that development; Cretton can't, because these are now characters in a cosmic sitcom that doesn't allow for the overturning of applecarts. None of it remotely matters outside the next five-to-ten years of Marvel movies - it is, at the end of the day, all the escapism a line item on a corporate portfolio can provide - and though Cretton goes lighter than usual on the studio-issue filters, it looks much the same as before, all backlots and blue screens. (Though I enjoyed the scenes of real New York streetlife under the closing credits: a breath of fresh, naturalistic air, at the very last.) The staggering opening weekend takings would suggest the MCU is back on its feet again, but this is hardly a brand new day, merely a renewal of what this studio was attempting to sell us on a decade ago - a reminder of partway functional mega-entertainments, of a moment when these movies were spectacularly mid rather than egregiously awful. This summer continues to cry out for something original, punchy and expertly executed - for a movie that qualifies as a movie, rather than a cinematic timeshare scheme or a pretext for spending three hours in an air-conditioned room.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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