Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Tom Holland’s best web (review)

After the fan service orgy of No Way Home, Peter Parker finds his DNA at the instigation of the director of Shang-Chi.

The people’s superhero is back. 5 years after his last adventure, where he crossed paths with Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in a crossover acclaimed by the public, the Tom Holland version of Spider-Man returns to the cinema for a fourth solo film, a little less than 5 months before the release ofAvengers: Doomsday. Already announced as the most lucrative blockbuster of the summer, this Spider-Man: Brand New Day does it live up to fans’ expectations?

At the end of the previous part, the Weaver asked Doctor Strange to erase Peter Parker from the memories of the inhabitants of his universe to repair his stupidities. Aunt May is dead, his girlfriend MJ (Zendaya) and his best friend Ned (Jaob Batallon) no longer know who he is. It is an isolated and depressed Spidey that we find in Brand New Day.

He lives alone in a shabby apartment, stalking MJ and Ned, whom he sees continuing their studies and then entering working life via social networks. His only pleasure: fighting crime in the streets of New York, twirling between skyscrapers like the good old days of Sam Raimi films, where he crosses paths with the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), another vigilante with brutal methods. A duo with a dynamic as successful as it is unexpected, which strangely echoes their scene from The Odysseywhere the two actors play Telemachus and Menelaus respectively.

Let’s say it straight away, Brand New Day is the best Spider-Man of the Tom Holland era. And this is greatly to the credit of Destin Daniel Cretton, already author of the delightful Shang-Chi for Marvel. He easily supplants the uninspired Jon Watts, who had definitely shown his limits as a director on No Way Homebarely masked by layers of (bad) fan service and the ecstasy of seeing three Spider-Mans on screen at the same time. All this to relegate the famous meme to a making-of…

Cretton knows how to film the action as well as the most intimate sequences, alternating them and taking advantage of the alchemy of his cast. And he does honorably with the Marvel specifications, which are rather light. The incorporation of Hulk (Mark Ruffalo as a superstar teacher of the lecture hall, we confirm) works, we are less convinced by that of Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh). What about Sadie Sink? At 24, the revelation of Stranger Things is already a great actress and she is obviously perfect in the mysterious role she plays in Brand New Day.

Hard to give a lot of details about his score without spoiling. The casting and promotion carefully kept the secret for months, before singer Steve Lacy (whose hit “Oh Yeah” concludes the film) dropped the bomb on the red carpet of the premiere Monday in Los Angeles, a few days before the film’s release. We won’t add any more. Except that she shares with Tom Holland the most beautiful and touching scene in the film. And that we risk seeing her again in the MCU.

The themes covered by Brand New Day are not revolutionary (the fear of oblivion, the transition to adulthood, the monster part that lies dormant in superheroes…) and the film is clearly too long (2h24 credits included), but it is difficult to deny pleasure in the face of solid entertainment which does not take the viewer for a fool. We’ll see if we think as highly of Doomsday at the end of the year…