Will Tom Holland, who we just saw struggling to live up to his father’s legacy in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, ever grow up? From his big break as one of the Billy Elliotts on the West End to the adorkable teenage web-slinger, Holland seems to have been coming-of-age for over a decade. In this latest instalment of what seems to be the only Marvel property with any real box office juice post Avengers: Endgame, four years whizz by in a montage, getting Peter Parker a smidge closer to Holland’s real life age of thirty. And while this is by far his most mature performance as the plucky but unlucky Spider-Man, he struggles to make much of an impact in yet another Marvel joint that only exists to set things in motion for the next tentpole.
Things were left in a right multiverse mess at the end of 2021’s mega-hit Spider-Man: No Way Home, with Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr Strange casting a spell to make everyone forget that Peter Parker is or was ever Spider-Man in order to rid this universe of errant villains and extra spider-men for alternative franchise outings. For some narratively convenient reason, this has also made his beloved MJ (Zendaya) and best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) totally forget who he is, super or not.
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Peter is also grieving the loss of Marisa Tomei’s sage but sexy Aunt May, and so we first encounter him in hyper-focused lone vigilante mode in a cycle of fighting crime, tinkering with gadgets in a crappy apartment and watching MJ and Ned’s social media updates of their college experiences. Being restored to his status as the anonymous friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man has condemned him to solitude; it’s the classic superhero mode of solitary sacrificial heroism. Oh, and he’s experiencing premature web ejaculation because his spider DNA is encroaching on his human cells.
Snapping Peter out of this monotony is the emergence of a mysterious telepathic entity able to leap between the minds of innocent bystanders. Said entity has its eyes set on a government agency named Damage Control (coincidentally something that seems to be characterising this current Marvel phase) and a mysterious Macguffin named V‑Max.
Some of the bogstandard convoluted Marvel set-up is, admittedly, charming at times. An early scene finds Peter reluctantly soaking in communal baths with Yelena (Florence Pugh), with only underwear and mask on to preserve his modesty and anonymity. As a cameo, it’s cute, but a more extended appearance from Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner/Hulk seems more of a contractual obligation than anything else. More fun is Frank Castle aka The Punisher (Jon Bernthal), a de Niro-esque grump for chirpy do-gooder Peter to riff with.
They say comparison is the thief of joy, and it’s especially difficult to engage with any of the totally weightless action sequences and wuxia imitations having just witnessed the genuinely jaw-dropping practical effects on display in The Odyssey. Here, there’s no chance of an awed gasp of “how did they do that?” when the answer is so obviously “computer”. Glasgow makes a good double for Manhattan but when everything is pinging through a rotoscoped-in sky, it’s of little consequence. A climactic mass mind control event is achieved more inventively with a kind of rainbow petrol streak and juddering effect.
As much as Spider-Man: No Way Home felt like slavish fan service, it did at least feel like it was telling its own story. Brand New Day might be hitting a reset button to a certain extent with a scrappy anonymous hero determined to win MJ’s heart, but so much late stage focus on its villain makes it more of a branding exercise for the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday then anything else. At least Peter finally learnt something about balancing both his hero and human identities after *checks notes* four films.