Well, as promised I saw Spider-Man: Brand New Day today and here’s my review, the film is good and I enjoyed it, it’s not great though. Let’s get started and as usual I’ll be doing my best to avoid any kind of spoilers in this review. However, there may be one or two details I cannot avoid and I at least assume you’ve seen trailers and know roughly what to expect.

Good, Not Great

I did enjoy this movie and I watched it with my kids who both enjoyed it as well. I guess my immediate feeling is that there’s a really great film in there, but it does not quite hit those heights consistently across the film.

I’ll start by saying that for me the first act was too fast paced and the second and final acts were too slow paced. We see Spider-Man’s previous successes which include characters seen in promotional material so far. However, most of them were one shot, not even a scene and then move on. For example, if you have seen the TV spots of Tarantula or Boomerang, then you’ve seen all the footage of them in the film. That’s not an exaggeration by the way, both appear in exactly one shot each.

Even Scorpion (first time round) gets like one line and done. The promotional material indicates Spidey will be battling Scorpion, The Hand, Boomerang, Ramrod and Tarantula in this film, but it’s a lie. Another character I expected to be used more and was literally in two shots was Tombstone.

The entire purpose of the marketing so far has been to sell us a movie that is not actually Spider-Man: Brand New Day. The goal to keep the main antagonist/plot secret was admirable. However, let’s be honest, it fell at the very first hurdle, despite efforts from Marvel to muddy the waters.

A few weeks ago, I predicted what I thought the main plot was going to be in this film, and I nailed it. Not because I had been spoiled, in fact the ending of this film has been kept pretty quiet. Instead, it’s more a case of once you know one or two details of who actors are playing, then the most obvious story falls into place.

Therefore, when it comes to surprises in this film, I never had many other than my surprise at how much of the film I had seen already in spots.

So Negative?

Yep that might seem like a negative take, but I’m trying to explain to you why it’s not a great movie, which it could have been in my opinion.

It’s great to see Spidey back in NYC, or at least, the digitally recreated NYC as they were actually in Glasgow. Cretton really gets the acrobatics and vertigo of seeing Spidey casually launching himself off the side of buildings. As for the fights, I’d say 95% were quality. I don’t like how nerfed Spidey was in one scene, which was purely for bad storytelling reasons. In other words, we need a cool Spidey fights back moment later, so let’s have him struggle before it.

Holland, Zendaya, Battalon were all great, yet team Spidey not being a ‘thing’ was kinda missed in this one. Sadie Sink was great and I’m sure we will be seeing her again very soon. Her dynamic with Holland worked as did that between Bernthal and Holland which is perhaps the highlight of the film. It was also great, even if only briefly, to see savage Hulk back. I have missed this guy and I hope he stays in the mix going forward. That being said, Hulk barely gets more time than Scorpion and that’s not much.

Yelena does appear and whilst I liked her scenes, I think they got the setting wrong and the film actually didn’t even need her to work. In fact I reckon if you count screen time, there’s probably more Yelena than Scorpion in this film, I could be wrong and It’ll be close either way.

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Good action, a decent plot which works out in an interesting way and some actors top of their game, that’s a good film. However, as said, it’s also not a great film, at least not for me.

Perhaps the film was simply too ambitious and tried to cram far too much into an already large runtime of 145 minutes. Yet, I’ll perhaps argue that some of what inevitably ended up on the cutting room floor should have stayed, whereas a few scenes that remained should have been cut instead.

I wanted to see more of Trammel Tillman for example as Bill Metzger. Overall I think he has less screentime than Detective DeWolff, who we maybe saw one or two times too many. That’s the little things that stop this film being great.

I’d say for me, Far From Home remains the best MCU Spider-Man movie, even with it not being set in NYC. This should have been better, but I’m not sure they quite pulled it off.

GRADE: B

There’s probably an edit that exists of this film someone could show me and I’ll give it an A. It’s almost there, but as I said above, there’s too much of pot A and not enough of pot B and so on and so forth. You kinda have that feeling that there’s been 17 cuts of this film all with test audiences and they reacted differently every time leaving Marvel confused about what the best cut was.

I also think the Spider-Man mutation storyline was too much to add into an already stuffed film. I get why it’s there thematically, but it gets introduced and then conveniently sidestepped till the writers want to bring it back again.

Enjoyed my time at the theatre watching this and look forward to more Holland Spider-Man films to come. I’d also be happy to see Cretton back, but perhaps next time the film needs to be tightened on the script page rather than the editing room, which is clearly what happened with Brand New Day.

As always, leave your thoughts below on my review of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, or leave your own take.

 

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