Since everyone he cares about is either dead or has forgotten him after the events of No Way Home, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) has been focusing solely on his Spider-Man duties. As a result, he has more or less eradicated organised crime in New York and is idolised by the city populace. On the downside, he is devoid of real human contact apart from phone calls to a detective and a grudging pseudo-friendship with gun toting vigilante Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal), aka The Punisher. He still pines after his lost relationships with MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) and it seems his isolation is beginning to have a physical effect on him. This couldn't come at a worse time, with a new threat that can seemingly inhabit anyone it wants coming to town.
The first third of the film is by far the strongest. Director Destin Daniel Cretton manages to give Spidey a different feel to his previous MCU outings. The New York he inhabits feels more real, but keeps enough of a primary colour palette that it still pops on screen and the moment-to-moment swinging through the city stuff is great. As Spider-Man uses his new gadgets, chases vehicles through the city and hitches a ride on a train, the piece of media Brand New Day most feels like is Insomniac's 2018 video game. This is no criticism as few things have ever captured the manic life of the webslinger so well.
Not that the film has forgotten where Spider-Man came from. The idea of a world full of heroes is handled very much like it is in comic books. There are now so many established characters in this world that it feels natural our hero would cross paths with Bruce Banner or Black Widow as he goes about his heroic business. Rather than feel forced, the appearance of other MCU characters comes across as simply part of the world building.
Unfortunately, as the film moves deeper into the actual plot, the web becomes much more frayed. There are three threads vying for attention. We have Peter's conflicted feelings about reintroducing himself to his former girlfriend and best mate, his potential physical transformation, and the conflict with the film's mysterious antagonist. A clunky script means these angles bounce off each other more than they meld together.
Most Marvel fans have probably worked out who the villain is, but hasn't been revealed so I won't spoil it here. It has been shown that they hop from person to person and take over their mind, and while the "they can be anyone" premise has potential, it isn't very visually interesting and doesn't give Spider-Man anyone to face off with in a climactic fight. The Hulk is brought in for a cameo to provide the physical threat but the fight between the wall crawler and green Goliath turns out to be a fairly underwhelming sidebar. The final resolution doesn't fit with what we've seen of the antagonist earlier in the film and feels like a far less successful rehash of the conclusion to last year's Marvel offering, The Thunderbolts*.
The ending is just one of the ways the movie tries to force more feeling than the screenplay is capable of delivering. Tom Holland and Zendaya have evolved into A-list stars and fantastic actors over the near decade they have been repeating these roles and they are more than capable of selling the emotional heart of the story. Rather than trust them to do this however, the film bashes the audience over the head with repeated flashbacks to previous films. It feels like lazy writing and is pretty pointless, MCU fans are hardly likely to have forgotten and any newcomers aren't going to get anything out of these scenes.
Its a shame the script isn't more polished as Tom Holland is the best he has ever been in the role and Brand New Day does a great job of creating a vibrant and immersive world for him to inhabit. As it is, an underwhelming villain and hollow conclusion leave the film feeling more like a throwaway comic issue than a landmark event.
6 working inhibitors out of 10.
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