Spider Man Is Back and More Emo Than Ever

Brand-new but still more of the same, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is plump with pathos for well over two hours, radiating the emo vibes of its memory-wiping, relative-snuffing predecessor Spider-Man: No Way Home. In this latest installment, Peter Parker (Tom Holland) is a moody outer borough New Yorker who buries himself in a frenzy of crime fighting, making him the saddest superhero in Queens. So much for a friendly neighborhood.

Hard not to blame him, though. After having his identity exposed to the world and enlisting Dr. Strange to cast a global amnesia spell, Peter now lives in total anonymity. Former best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and former girlfriend M.J. (Zendaya) are completely oblivious to his existence. He’s even in familial isolation, ever since the Green Goblin gleefully killed off his smoking-hot Aunt May (Marisa Tomei).

Spider-Man: Brand New Day ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Destin Daniel Cretton
Written by: Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers
Starring: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Tramell Tillman, Michael Mando, Mark Ruffalo
Running time: 145 mins

To its credit, this fourth film with Holland as the webslinger actually pushes him completely out of high school and officially makes him twentysomething. The film’s time lapse is almost as accelerated as Thanos’s five-year interregnum. In this case, the blip is college: four years fly by, while Peter helplessly watches Ned’s Instagram account (@thegratefulned42, in case you want to follow) chronicling his and M.J.’s undergraduate experience at M.I.T.

They’ve made other friends — and she’s even found someone else to date. Meanwhile, Peter sits alone in his apartment, stoically overseeing a bank of crime-monitoring computer screens and suit-modification tech while clinging to that confessional letter he was going to read to M.J. explaining their shared past.

Lucky for him, Ned and M.J. move back to New York and room together in Manhattan. So he sneaks into their housewarming kegger and awkwardly tries to ingratiate himself. Neither could care less. Doesn’t he have better things to do, like keep the city safe from master criminals?

He does, actually: one mysterious baddie actually seems to enter the minds of its victims, jumping from one person to another while controlling their actions and leading to a very impressive jailbreak for milquetoast baddie Scorpion (Michael Mando, a performance reduced to grimaces). While trying to fend off the attack, Spidey runs into fellow Queens vigilante Frank Castle, aka the Punisher (Jon Bernthal). “This friggin’ guy,” moans Spidey at the sight of Frank, whose grim schtick developed recently in multiple Marvel TV appearances has been turned into big-screen bro energy. His presence only exacerbates Spider-Man’s pursuit of the strange spirit, who gets away scot-free.

Time to check in with the big-potato Avengers — specifically Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), who apparently works out of a swimming pool in a downtown Russian bath house. “This is small potato stuff, not big potato brain stuff,” she sneers. Her take is that this isn’t mind control; it’s more like possession.

And while the creepy culprit remains on the loose, Spider-Man has to contain another outbreak: his arachnid hormones increasing. Almost like superhero puberty, Spidey has now developed the uncontrolled urge to shoot organic webs from his wrists. He even wakes up entangled in his own web after one prodigious night of secretions. Talk about a nocturnal emission!

Good thing he can pop into nearby Empire State University and consult with professor Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), who these days sports an inhibitor sleeve on his right hand. It’s like he suffers from carpal tunnel syndrome, but the kind that turns you into a big green raging monster.

So Spider-Man invents a custom gene silencing device the size of a USB drive that tames his surging DNA expression — and actually doubles as a universal inhibitor, so it can tame anyone with any powers. which comes in handy once Sadie Sink pops up as the mysterious hooded mastermind behind all the people-jumping possessions.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day has a lot of legacy-character housekeeping to perform, what with resolving Peter’s severed ties to Ned and M.J.; adding the Punisher to the big-screen roster of MCU characters; making room for cameos from the Hulk and Yelena (all the better to segue into December’s  upcoming Avengers: Doomsday blockbuster); lamely name-checking a bunch of useless bad guys like Scorpion, Boomerang, and Lonnie Lincoln; folding in wordless martial-arts group The Hand; and surprisingly teeing up the mutant world of the X-Men. Let’s hope Disney is writing a big check to Sony for helping them keep their moribund Marvel franchise feeling fresh and relevant.

Fun, though, this is not. Peter Parker has always been a character who struggles with the awkward and sometime heartbreaking balance between being a superhero and being a kid from Queens. With great power comes great responsibility, amirite? But also maybe not so much trauma-bonding and grief counseling.

“I’m just so happy that the sad man has friends,” teases Yelena at one point, once she notices how Spidey is starting to reconnect with people. Spider-Man: The Sad Man Has Friends — as an alternate film title, her snarky dig isn’t half bad.