Spider-Man: Brand New Day successfully sends the audience to sleep

As George W. Bush once famously said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, you can’t get fooled again.”

The Marvel Cinematic Universe likes to tell people that their movies are serious, real movies made by real directors and tell real, serious stories.

In the past, directors Anthony and Joe Russo have claimed that a Captain America movie set in Washington, D.C. and starring Robert Redford was just like the 1970s political thrillers directed by Alan J. Pakula.

While making one of the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, director Jon Watts claimed that he was inspired by the works of Richard Linklater and the Before movies.

So, when Tom Holland himself tells the press that working with Christopher Nolan on The Odyssey inspired him to make Brand New Day the best Spider-Man movie yet, critics entered Spidey’s latest outing with more cynicism than usual.

It turns out our cynicism was justified, for once.

Brand New Day is the exact same as every other Spider-Man movie and Marvel movie that has come before it.

If you genuinely believed that Tom Holland suddenly had a come-to-Jesus moment and realised he was spending his life making artistically hollow, disposable content, we have a bridge to sell you.

For fans of key jingling cinema, where fan service exists in place of substance, this is the film of the year.

Nothing we say in this review will deter people from seeing it, with the film on track to make more money than the GDP of a small European nation.

Films like this are successful in the same way that people still pay to see Coldplay or Take That; it is safe, familiar, and will not challenge your sensibilities in a meaningful way.

If you are reading this review, you have already made your mind up if you want to see this film or not; but that is part of the problem.

Audiences will turn out, sight unseen, for a movie with no substance or ideas simply because it will make the audience feel like they are 12 years old again.

Film critics were young once; this critic has distinct memories of seeing Spider-Man 3 for their 11th birthday party in May 2007.

That film was messy and flawed, but it at least had ideas and a distinct style thanks to Sam Raimi.

Spider-Man 3 was let down because it tried to add too many characters; nearly 20 years later, and Hollywood still hasn’t learned their lessons.

Spider-Man gets his own movie hijacked to introduce a new, important character to the MCU (we can’t reveal the identity of said character, as Sony has a crack team of trained snipers deployed on any critic who reveals the identity), and it massively contributes to the film feeling like a bloated, overdone mess.

If you cut this character out of the movie, you could tell the same story in under two hours and have people leaving the cinema happy.

Instead, this character drags the film to a screeching halt, and only exists in the plot to set up more movies.

If you want our genuine recommendation for a good film to see, check out Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie if it is playing near you.

That film is a genuine technical feat that leaves you wondering how the filmmakers weren’t arrested while filming it.

That small Canadian movie is an ode to friendship and has a creative streak that a Spider-Man movie could only dream of.

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie has a budget of $2 million dollars and has better filmmaking, editing and visual effects work than a Spider-Man movie with a $230 million budget.

Next year marks 25 years since Sam Raimi’s take on Spider-Man hit cinema screens (awful post-grunge soundtrack and all), and that movie gets everything right that the Holland movies have never grasped.

The first Spider-Man is two hours on the dot; not a single minute is wasted, and every scene earns its place.

Further films in the Raimi trilogy flesh out the character further (2004’s Spider-Man 2 is a high watermark of the superhero genre as it combines exciting action with human, emotional character work), but the Holland films fail to achieve what was done 20 years ago.

Brand New Day is something of a soft reboot for Spidey; after the events of No Way Home, where a spell is cast to make everyone forget about him, we are back at square one.

The basis for a solid, human story is there, and the film is at its best when it plays with the ideas of Spider-Man the hero masking Peter Parker, the miserable human.

Now, here is how the movie screws it up.

It’s never enough to have a self-contained story in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; you need characters doing drop-ins like a soap opera crossover, and you need to grind the movie to a halt to set up the next 7 movies.

Characters dropping in and out do make it feel like a comic book, but what works in a comic book doesn’t necessarily gel in a movie.

The presence of Jon Bernthal as The Punisher is odd; his TV series is grim and gritty, and has a violent streak to it that the MCU doesn’t have.

Slotting him in alongside the gee-whizz, wide-eyed Tom Holland depiction of Spider-Man is just odd.

The film has a golden opportunity to make Peter Parker a genuine character who is starting from scratch all over again.

In the first 90 seconds, we see he is living in a nice apartment, full to the brim with state-of-the-art technology.

The crucial mistake the Holland movies made was forgetting the class elements that made Spider-Man so relatable to begin with.

In the comics, and the Raimi movies, Spider-Man is always worried about holding down a job, making rent that month and trying to find the girl.

This movie continues with the status quo that was established in Homecoming; he is being bankrolled by Tony Stark, and money isn’t an issue for him.

Four movies in, and the makers of these movies still fundamentally misunderstand Spider-Man as a character.

In a bid to keep Holland happy, Challengers and Queer screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes was brought in to do dialogue punch-up, and his influence can be felt in certain scenes.

If the film slows down and Tom Holland and Zendaya sound like they are two adults having an actual, human conversation, that scene was most likely written by Kuritzkes.

Kuritzkes isn’t credited in the main credit block (as is the case with most rewrite jobs in Hollywood), but the scenes clearly written by him hint at the more mature movie that Holland thinks he was making.

A Spider-Man movie that slows down and takes the time to flesh out the characters is what we want, not even more franchise table dressing.

Destin Daniel Cretton has taken over from Jon Watts in the director’s chair, and some credit where it’s due, he has a much better understanding of action direction than Watts ever did.

One third-act action sequence puts some colour back in the movie’s cheeks, and Cretton has more of a focus on pulling off in-camera fight choreography.

As stated, there is nothing we haven’t seen in Brand New Day that we haven’t seen done better, elsewhere.

Because Spider-Man is a license to print money, this film will overperform and sell out cinemas for weeks; but audiences should still demand better.

Praising a superhero movie for doing the bare minimum isn’t where the genre needs to be in 2026.

Just last year, James Gunn showed that you can still make a Superman movie that is both grounded and epic.

There is no excuse for a film of this level to be this sloppy and this boring; because this movie will be incredibly successful, a lorry truck of money will be driven to Tom Holland’s house, and he will have his arm twisted into doing three more.

If these kinds of films keep the lights on at cinemas, so be it; we’ll just go see The Odyssey for a third time instead.