Spider-ManBrand New Day

The last time we saw Peter Parker, he asked the world to forget him and the world agreed. Spider-Man: Brand New Day picks up five years after that. Nobody knows his name. His best friend does not know him. The woman he loved does not know him. He still puts on the suit every night anyway. That is the whole film in one sentence, and it is the best idea a Spider-Man movie has had in twenty years.

Destin Daniel Cretton takes over as director, and the change is obvious from the first ten minutes. No Way Home was a party. This is a much quieter film about a young man who is completely alone in a city of eight million people, and who has started to confuse being needed with being loved.

Tom Holland is very good in it. He has always been the funny, nervous version of the character. Here he is tired. There is a stillness to him in the first act that he has never been allowed to play before, and it changes how everything else lands.

The loneliness is the plot

The smartest thing the film does is refuse to solve Peter's problem quickly. He watches Ned and MJ live their lives from a distance. He introduces himself to people who used to love him. He goes home to an empty room.

Marvel films usually rush past this kind of material to get to the next fight. This one sits in it. Michael Giacchino's score does a lot of the work, pulling back to almost nothing in the quiet scenes so the noise of the action feels earned when it arrives.

Pairing him with Frank Castle is a strange idea on paper and it works completely. Jon Bernthal plays the Punisher as the answer Peter could become if he stops caring, and the film never has to say that out loud. The two of them together give the middle of the movie a real edge.

The action is the best in years

The swinging looks incredible. Brett Pawlak shoots New York like a real place with weather and traffic, not like a grey video game level, and there is a long first person sequence through the city that is genuinely the best web-slinging ever put on screen.

The fights have weight too. Spider-Man gets hurt in this film and stays hurt. The villain is built around something Peter cannot see, which forces the action scenes to be about panic and instinct instead of punching, and that is a much more interesting problem for this character.

Where it slips

It is too long. Two hours and twenty five minutes, and you feel every minute of the second half. The film keeps stopping to introduce people and set up things that clearly belong to the next movie, and every time it does that, the story about a lonely man loses its grip on you.

MJ and Ned also get less than they deserve. Zendaya and Jacob Batalon are both good in what they are given, but the emotional centre of the film is Peter watching them, not Peter with them, and by the end you want more of the second thing.

Most critics have gone further than I have. A lot of them are calling this the best Spider-Man film since Spider-Man 2 in 2004, and I understand why. It is close. What holds it back for me is the last forty minutes, where the franchise takes the wheel back from the character.