The Spider-Man movies keep inventing fresh ways to put Peter Parker through a woodchipper, and Brand New Day might be the most bruising entry yet. Pete has lost the entire scaffolding of his old life and has to rebuild it from nothing, and it hands him Frank Castle as the world’s least patient contractor. I walked in fully expecting a good time, and I walked out having watched one of the strongest character dramas Marvel has released in years.
Which isn’t saying much since most of the films in the post-Endgame era have been terrible or forgettable (Except you, Shang-Chi. You are perfect exactly as you are).
When we first meet Peter, he is starting over with almost nothing to his name. He is grinding through the day to day, keeping his identity buried, and trying to convince himself that a quiet ordinary life is kinda sorta still available to a guy who moonlights as Spider-Man. Or, more specifically, he just stalks MJ and Ned across social media and eventually, in-person.
After the events of the last film, Doctor Strange’s spell wiped Peter Parker out of the collective memory of everyone he ever knew, and Brand New Day picks up the wreckage four years down the line. Peter is still swinging through New York as its beloved Spider-Man, except now nobody has any idea who the guy under the mask is, and he has quietly let it stay that way. He has walled himself off from the people who used to make his life worth protecting and that loneliness is the foundation the entire movie is built on, and it gives the whole thing a melancholy weight that most superhero films never bother to earn.
Without giving away the turns, the setup goes like this. Peter’s carefully managed isolation starts falling apart on two fronts at once. MJ and Ned have moved back to the city after finishing school, and they walk right past him without a flicker of recognition, which is its own special kind of gut punch. At the same time, a body-hopping telepath begins carving a path through New York, leaping from one victim to the next while hunting for something buried inside the Department of Damage Control. Peter gets dragged into the middle of it, and to make things worse, his own body starts behaving in ways he cannot explain or control.
Cornered and increasingly desperate to keep the few people he loves safe, he turns to Frank Castle, and that is where the movie really comes alive. I will leave the rest for you to find in the theater, because the story has more going on under the hood than the trailers let on.
Tom Holland is doing the best work of his time in the suit here. He plays a Peter who is worn down to the bone, and he sells both the grief and the flashes of frightening anger that come with it. Zendaya returns as MJ and finally gets material worthy of her, playing a woman who is a complete stranger to the man who remembers loving her. Jacob Batalon’s Ned brings warmth back into Peter’s orbit, and the slow rebuild of that friendship put a lump in my throat more than once. Jon Bernthal steps back into Frank Castle like the years never happened. [Redacted] turns up as [Redacted], Mark Ruffalo lends a hand as Bruce Banner, and the film’s central telepath is played with real menace and, eventually, real heartbreak.
The relationship between Peter and Frank is the single best reason to buy a ticket. On the surface these two should not last five minutes in the same room. Peter wants to save everybody, and Frank keeps a much shorter and much bloodier to-do list. The movie earns its stripes by refusing to flatten that difference between them.
Frank gives Peter a safe place to stash the people he cares about along with the gear to fight back, and in return Peter drags a little bit of buried humanity back out of him. Their scenes together are frequently hilarious, mostly because Holland cannot stop talking and Bernthal can deliver an entire paragraph with one flat stare. Then, with almost no warning, those same scenes turn quietly devastating. Two damaged men circling the same grief from opposite directions makes for a stronger hook than anything the plot’s antagonist is cooking up.
The big worry going in was always how a character as brutal as the Punisher could possibly survive inside a PG-13 Spider-Man movie, and the answer is that the filmmakers understood exactly where Frank’s menace comes from. His threat lives in his certainty, in the way he has already decided how things are going to end long before anyone else in the room catches up. Bernthal plays that stillness perfectly, and the camera always knows the precise moment to look away. You feel the weight of what Frank does through the faces of the people around him and through Peter’s obvious alarm at simply standing next to the man.
The movie keeps Punisher genuinely dangerous while keeping its own hands clean, and pulling that off takes real discipline.
Now for the one thing that made me wince. The visual effects wobble in a few places, and there is one late-ish fight between Spider-Man and a swarm of Hand ninjas where the seams show badly. At a certain point the ninjas start throwing shuriken stars, and I am telling you these are the worst rendered throwing stars I have ever seen in a movie with this kind of budget. They look weightless and rubbery, as if somebody dropped placeholder assets into the final cut and forgot to swap them out for the real thing. The rest of that sequence is tense and well choreographed, which only makes the cartoon shuriken stick out harder. The stretch is short, and the film recovers from a relatively ignorable floundering almost immediately, but it is the kind of blemish you will not be able to unsee once you have noticed it.
That single gripe does not sink the movie, because Brand New Day cares far more about its people than its punch-ups. Zendaya and Batalon are both doing career-best work, and the emotional story the three friends carry together sneaks up on you and knocks the wind out of your chest.
This is a Spider-Man film that remembers Peter Parker is a person long before he is a product. Bring tissues, forgive the shuriken, and go see it.
