For those who have forgotten, memory loss was the plot twist that ended the previous Spider-Man movie, No Way Home. In order to save the world, Tom Holland’s Peter Parker had to make his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and the love of his life, MJ – played by the love of Holland’s life Zendaya – forget all about him.
Brand New Day opens with Spidey attempting to reconcile himself to the fact that he means nothing to the people who once loved him. His antidote to this unhappy state is to throw himself into the job of catching criminals and stringing them up in his web in his characteristically humane way. This spider wouldn’t hurt a fly.
It is a life of action and introspection as he sits upside down on ledges with the city’s skyscrapers pointing up at him, as relaxed as those construction workers in the famous photograph who are eating lunch on a New York girder. And then, with another alert flashing on his portable real-time crime detector system (his mobile phone) he’s off, allowing himself to plummet Earth-bound through the skyscape. We are with him cheek-by-jowl inside the mask, still with the introspection: MJ’s life without him. His life without her. The air rushing past like a jet stream.
The flying scenes in director Destin Daniel Cretton’s first Marvel movie are the most thrilling of any Spider-Man film. You can hear the tensile twang of the web as it attaches itself to a piece of New York at one end and Parker at the other as he arcs through a skyscraper valley.
This is not a superhero fit for the bungalow cul-de-sacs of Norfolk. “Do MJ and Peter get back together?” asked my 13-year-old daughter when I got back from the screening. The answer is complicated and cannot be simplified without attracting the spoiler police. But what can be said is that the initial reunion of two soul mates, one of whom has tumbleweed where love for the other used to be, is handled disarmingly – and yes – tear-jerkingly well.
More impressive still is how Chris McKenna’s script dovetails the will-they-or-won’t-they story into the main action. Parker is getting headaches. There is a stronger, faster, meaner Spidey inside him trying to get out. Inconveniently this is happening just as a mysterious new threat to civilisation emerges. To suppress this monster – the one inside him not the new threat – Peter the tech-bro develops a DNA inhibitor along similar lines to the one Bruce Banner uses to suppress his inner Hulk.
The plot’s kinetic climax pulls in ex-soldier and vigilante Frank Castle, a one-man walking armoury known as The Punisher, played by Jon Bernthal as a grudge in human form. Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk with his own monster-within issues also turns up for the punch-up and so does Sadie Sink, this movie’s secret weapon.
The Stranger Things star is clearly here to stay in the MCU franchise which can’t help being the very thing of which cinema audiences are tiring.
Still, the movie has bucked the trend of diminishing returns at the box office, though how long Holland’s older, wiser adult Spider-Man can continue is another question. He is no longer the embodiment of fresh-faced good-natured teen. He now has mental and physical scars.
And for me a 30-something Spider-Man with the middle years around the corner will feel as wrong as those fully grown men who cling on to their skateboards.
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