Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review: Tom Holland Finally Gets a Spider-Man Movie That Grows Up With Him

Destin Daniel Cretton trades multiverse cameos for a lonelier, street-level Peter Parker, and a battered homemade suit, Sadie Sink's Jean Grey and Jon Bernthal's Punisher mostly earn the 145 minutes.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day starts where No Way Home left its hero: alone. Four years after Doctor Strange's spell wiped Peter Parker from the memory of everyone who ever loved him, Tom Holland's Peter is still patrolling New York every night, but nobody is waiting for him when he gets home. His civilian life is falling apart, and the stress is doing something strange to his body. His powers are changing, and he can now spin webs on his own instead of relying on the shooters he can no longer afford to build. Director Destin Daniel Cretton, who made Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and returning writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers build the whole film around that isolation instead of around a crossover event. After three films where Peter's story kept getting folded into someone else's, the choice alone makes this the most distinct entry of the Holland era.

The plot kicks in when Sadie Sink's Jean Grey arrives. She is a young mutant with telepathic and telekinetic powers, searching for a missing sister and following a trail that runs through the Department of Damage Control. Without spoiling where that leads, the film uses Jean as a mirror. She is another powerful kid the world has decided it can ignore, and Sink plays her with a guarded, coiled stillness that makes her scenes with Holland the quietest and best in the movie. It's a smart way to bring the X-Men corner of Marvel into Spider-Man's world. She arrives as a person with a problem, not as a trailer beat.

Holland is the main reason the film works. Across three Spider-Man movies he has played Peter as a gifted kid being mentored, managed and eventually rescued by older heroes. Here, for the first time, there's no one left to rescue him, and he plays the loneliness without self-pity: a young man who has chosen anonymity and is only now learning what it costs. IndieWire called it his "most nuanced and mature Spider-Man performance to date," and USA Today described it as his "most emotionally gripping work ever." Neither is overstating it. Zendaya's MJ and Jacob Batalon's Ned, who in this timeline don't know who he is, are used sparingly and to real effect. The scenes where Peter stands a few feet from his former best friends as a polite stranger land harder than any of the action.

The action is also genuinely good, and it looks different from the last two films. Cretton leans on practical stunt work, with choreography modelled on Insomniac's Spider-Man games, and a suit Peter has sewn himself. It is deliberately wrinkled and imperfect, and Holland is reportedly inside it for most of the film rather than being replaced by a digital double. The swinging has weight and the fights have real bodies in them. Shot partly for IMAX, with Glasgow and London standing in for Manhattan, the set pieces feel closer to Sam Raimi's street-level Spider-Man than to the portal-hopping spectacle of No Way Home. Michael Giacchino, scoring Holland's Spider-Man for the fourth time, matches the lonelier story with his most melancholy music for the character.

Jon Bernthal's Frank Castle is the film's loudest gamble, and critics are split on it. Collider called Bernthal "an absolute scene-stealer," while Yahoo's Brett Arnold found his take on the Punisher "very silly." Both are fair. Bernthal plays Castle with the same bruised menace he brought to the character on Netflix, and he is terrific in every scene. But a lethal vigilante sits awkwardly next to a PG-13 Peter Parker, and the film never fully squares what Peter thinks of him. Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner, Florence Pugh's Yelena Belova and Tramell Tillman's Damage Control director are more obviously there to connect this story to the wider Marvel slate. The Boston Globe's complaint that "far too much time is spent introducing characters or fan service situations continuing in future installments" is the most accurate criticism of the film.

That criticism shows up in the running time. At 145 minutes, Brand New Day is nearly as long as No Way Home, but without that film's reunion payoffs to carry it, and the middle stretch sags under subplots that exist mainly to set up future ones. Variety's Owen Gleiberman, the most skeptical of the major critics, headlined his review "A 'Mature' Adventure Trying Too Hard" and argued that 30 minutes could have been cut. He's right about the length even if he undersells everything around it. The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney praised the film for having "the good sense to stop banging on about the damn multiverse," but noted that Cretton's grasp of pacing isn't always ideal.

Most critics came down firmly on the film's side. It holds a 90% Tomatometer score across 435 reviews, and the Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus calls it "a promising reset" that spins "spectacular set pieces together with mature emotional stakes and Tom Holland's soulful performance." Metacritic's sample is cooler, at a "generally favorable" 66 from 56 critics. The San Francisco Chronicle gave it a perfect score and compared it to The Empire Strikes Back. The Independent called it "flat out the best Spider-Man film" since Raimi's Spider-Man 2. Audiences have been even warmer, with a 97% Popcornmeter score from more than 25,000 verified ratings. At the box office it passed $2 billion worldwide in three weeks and overtook Star Wars: The Force Awakens as the highest-grossing film ever in the US, according to Variety.

Who is it for? If the multiverse era wore you out, Brand New Day is the easiest recommendation Marvel has had in years: a self-contained, character-first Spider-Man story that you can follow having seen only No Way Home. If you want tight pacing and a clean standalone ending, go in knowing that the film is also, unmistakably, the first chapter of something larger. FilmRated Score: 84/100. It's the most grown-up and best-acted Spider-Man film since 2004, and it's held back from greatness mainly by its own obligations to the rest of the franchise.