The latest Marvel film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, is precisely what many moviegoers, and performatively pained movie critics, have been demanding for years now: a grounded, street-level take on superheroes that eschews cosmic crises and portals through spacetime to focus on human-scale, emotional elements.
Just how grounded is it, you ask? Put it this way: There is a character in this movie whose superpower gets depicted onscreen with 1. A sound effect and 2. Choreography.
With modern dance, specifically. It's fun to imagine this character at a mixer for super-powered types as they munch on passed apps and introduce themselves:
FIRST SUPER: "I can turn invisible."
SECOND SUPER: "I can burst into flames."
THIRD SUPER: "I have the proportionate strength and ability of a spider. How about you?"
THIS CHARACTER: "Me? Um. (Quietly) Twyla Tharp flash mob."
THIRD SUPER: "... Sorry?"
THIS CHARACTER: "I can instigate a Twyla Tharp flash mob on the streets of New York."
THIRD SUPER: "Oh. Cool."
The thing is — it is cool. The effect involves no CGI pyrotechnics at all, just a sequence of people artfully convulsing. It's a thrillingly low-fi but undeniably propulsive and kinetic spectacle, and it works on every level.
If the movie itself doesn't, particularly, one big reason is its abrupt shift in narrative focus. A new character takes over the film for much of its third act, and no matter how good the actor in question (very) or how compelling the character (not very), they're not what these movies are about. (Forgive the coyness about their identity, but Marvel's being even more militant about spoilers than baseline, with this one.)
This particular MCU franchise is anchored, or should be, by the bonds between Tom Holland's sweet-natured Peter Parker, Zendaya's tough MJ (these films always talk a big game about how weird and dark MJ is, but that's never quite made its way to the screen) and Jacob Batalon's enthusiastically nerdy Ned.
But following the events of the previous Spidey film, No Way Home, that core cast has been fractured, for reasons having to do with staving off a multiversal collapse, or whatever. In the new reality, nobody remembers that Peter Parker is Spider-Man, or that Peter Parker even exists. As a result, Pete grimly goes it alone, grimly fighting street-level bad guys, grimly getting takeout and eating alone in his grim Spidey-lair, grimly spying on MJ and Ned's amazing college life.
Now look: melancholy is baked into Spider-Man, always has been. Like a lot of characters in Marvel movies and comics, he's got a two-stroke engine: He's funny, and he's sad.
He's a light-hearted, quippy character who is never not simultaneously wracked with things like grief and angst and — not to point too fine a point on it — depression. When you set out to tell a Spidey story, you adjust the happy/sad fuel mixture to fit the story you're telling.
So it makes perfect sense for this film, coming as it does in the wake of thick and gooey cosmic-temporal-multiversal slumgullions like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Loki's wincingly Kang-focused second season, to take a collective breather and remind everyone that what distinguishes this guy is his status as a kid from Queens.
Sure, he can do cosmic, and you can take him to space — but when he's there, he's there to point up a contrast. At every opportunity, he's gotta be like that guy from Clerks: "I'm not even supposed to be here today!"
So Brand New Day dutifully supplies a darker, glummer, entirely New York-based version of Spider-Man that spotlights his loneliness and heartbreak. That's exactly the Spider-Man many fans have been patiently waiting for, and they'll eat it up with a big ol' spoon.
But to achieve that darker sensibility, the film attempts to shunt the humor that once lived in the Peter-Ned friendship onto the shoulders of Jon Bernthal's Punisher. And those shoulders, as impressively broad and powerful as they may be, are simply not up to the challenge.
As a result, Brand New Day is missing something essential; by spotlighting the fracturing of our core trio, the film makes us wallow in it. There's so much heartbreak we lose the heart.
And there's so much stark loneliness on hand that Peter's complicated relationship to the character played by Sadie Sink, which quickly grows sodden with therapy-speak, never jells to the degree it needs to. What it does instead is impel a subplot involving Peter's evolving arachnid super-powers to a rushed and unsatisfying non-resolution.
An appearance by Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner/Hulk doesn't contribute the narrative weight it wants to, either. Fight scenes? It supplies those, all right, along with the visceral thrill that comics readers derive from seeing familiar splash page layouts depicted onscreen. But not much else.
Avengers: Doomsday lies in wait, just around the corner, promising more turgid, cosmic-level storytelling stuffed with forced but fleeting conflicts between discrete groups of heroes. For now, we have Brand New Day, a film made expressly for those fans who want to watch their heroes grappling with — even suffering under — great responsibility.
As for all that "great power" stuff? Not so much.
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