By Michael Marano

The webslinger’s new outing has the cameos, the conspiracy, and the corporate logic. What it doesn’t have is heart.

Spider Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. In wide release

A copy of Marvel Team-Up. Photo: courtesy of the author

When I was a kid, one of my fave comic books was Marvel Team-Up, each issue of which featured Spider-Man… well… teaming up with other Marvel superheroes. This was, even then, naked Intellectual Property management. Marvel was using Spidey, their most popular hero, as a gateway drug to introduce kids to other heroes in their roster. It’s how I was introduced to Daredevil, and Daredevil soon became more of a favorite of mine than even Spidey. One of the most-est awesome-est runs of Marvel Team-Up, written by the great Bill Mantlo, creator of Rocket Raccoon, involved Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Iron Man fighting an undead, cyborg, mind-controlled guy called The Wraith. Glorious!

Yeah, it was IP management, but it made a weird kind of sense within the narrative reality of Marvel comics. There was an odd integrity to it. Of course, all these superheroes crammed into the 23 square miles of Manhattan would keep bumping into each other. Sort of like how on Mad Men, all the ad guys crammed into the 23 square miles of Manhattan knew each other.

I’m happy to report Spider-Man: Brand New Day is packed with special guest superheroes in ways that are clearly IP management on the part of Disney, Sony, and Marvel. But, as with Marvel Team-Up, these guest star appearances feel organic to the storytelling, and natural. Just like all the team-up scenarios cooked up in the comic books.

And I’m sad to report that just about everything else in Brand New Day blows webby chunks, especially after the absolute triumph of the series’ previous entry, Spider-Man: No Way Home.

2021’s No Way Home was full of IP management stunts, bringing our current Spidey Tom Holland together with previous Spideys, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. But Lordy, did it have heart. Brand New Day needs that same level of heart to function as a story, but the movie seems too chickenshit to tackle the profound hurt required to buttress the narrative.

At the end of No Way Home, Peter Parker has lost everyone and everything he loves. He’s lost his past, and his future. And Brand New Day director Destin Daniel Cretton (at the behest of studio brass?) doesn’t make us feel that isolation and loneliness. This is integral to Brand New Day working as a narrative. The very premise of Peter as a young man in his shitty New York hovel dealing with isolation requires Taxi Driver and Hubert Selby, Jr.- level of solitude. Yeah, Peter deals with his isolation by diving into crimefighting at workaholic levels. But being Spider-Man isn’t just a secret identity. It adds to Peter’s invisibility. We’re told about Peter’s loneliness and invisibility. But there’s no gut punch to it, following up the extra special Sunday gut punch we got at the end of No Way Home.

We live in a world in which people are dying of loneliness. For Cretton to not step up and ladle on Autumn Sonata levels of emotional ouch to Peter’s melancholy is more than just an aesthetic screw up that undermines the plausibility of the story. It’s an abdication of his moral obligation. Just take a look at Obsession and, yeah, I’m not kidding, Masters of the Universe for much more powerful treatments of the isolation guys dead-ending in their 20s are feeling.

A scene from Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Photo: Sony Pictures

In a lot of ways, Brand New Day is a reboot of Holland’s Spidey series (reportedly, first in a new trilogy). As such, it requires shit-tons of exposition to re-set Peter’s reality for this Spidey movie and the ones to follow. There are no fewer than three sources of exposition and they are clunky and talky to the point of jamming the narrative. The exposition is so intrusive that it doesn’t let us feel what we need to feel for Brand New Day to work at all. The movie is too busy laying groundwork for future movies to build on the groundwork laid by the previous movie.

Spidey has to face-off against a nameless new baddie who jumps from body to body, controlling people in order to attain a goal I’ll not spoil. (Why Peter doesn’t reach out to Doctor Strange or Wong for help on this is baffling, but never mind.) And it’s really, really disconcerting that Spidey is working with a thinly disguised Homeland Security (that deploys ICE-like masked thugs to snatch people off the streets), is hacking Flock cameras to hunt the body hopper, and is developing tech to neutralize the abilities of superbeings and sharing it with an obviously unethical government. Yeah, Peter learns the error of his ways. But his failure to see how problematic all this is earlier strains credulity more than the premise of a villain hijacking people’s nervous systems.

There are maybe four plots to Brand New Day, each of which is the set-up for future movies: Peter’s filling the void of his life by crimefighting; a Cronenberg-y bit of body horror; a Three Days of the Condor-style conspiracy thriller, and a heist/rescue plot. But these plots aren’t plots unto themselves; they are investments in plots to come, so none of them feel really finished. I can’t help but wonder if Brand New Day was originally the outline of a trilogy that was squished down and repurposed to be the opening of a trilogy. Honestly the last act, if it’d been properly developed, would have been a banger of a movie on its own.

This is not to say Brand New Day is a total dud. There are some truly great moments, and one special guest superhero (originally a Spider-Man villain when I was reading comic books) almost steals the movie from Spider-Man. And hey, parts of Brand New Day are so much like Marvel Team-Up, I dug a few of those old issues out of my collection for a re-read, and that’s a good thing.

But Brand New Day is still a let-down, an unworthy heir to No Way Home, which I’m not ashamed to say, choked me up. There wasn’t an instant of Brand New Day that moved me as much, despite its having the same writing team.

Some team-ups are disappointments.

As a kid in Buffalo, author, critic, writing coach and personal trainer Michael Marano used to buy Marvel Team-Up at Herzog’s Pharmacy on Main Street and Grant’s Comics on Hertel, across from the North Park Theatre, that showed the most awesome matinees, like Slithis, Scanners, The Fog, and Phantasm. Herzog’s and Grant’s are long-gone, but Thank God the North Park is still doing cool stuff, like showing Twin Peaks, Season 2 on the big screen.