Spider-Man: Brand New Day – ‘entertaining spectacle’

“Someone give Tom Holland a holiday,” said Kevin Maher in The Times. Not only did he just give “The Odyssey” its “beating heart”, the 30-year-old Londoner has also been tasked with rescuing the “ailing superhero genre”. The latest – 38th! – instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe opens not with the usual montage of Avengers clips but with images from Holland’s hugely successful appearances as Spider-Man.

After a series of expensive misfires for the most commercially successful film franchise of all time, the message is clear: “Marvel is now the house that Tom built.” “Brand New Day”, Holland’s fourth outing in the role, picks up where 2021’s “No Way Home” left off, with mild-mannered Peter Parker having arranged for the world to forget that he ever existed.

So we find him back at square one, living in a scuzzy New York apartment, “lost and broken” – not least because his sweetheart MJ (Holland’s real-life wife Zendaya) and his best buddy Ned (Jacob Batalon) have been “cruelly memory-wiped out of his life”.

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Those opening 20 minutes are “the strongest of the film”, said John Nugent in Empire. Holland is “brilliant” as the once puppyish Peter, “bruised by grief and solitude”. But what rescues the film is Zendaya’s performance, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Playing a non-superhero, she is able to bring a grown-up acting presence to the fore to cut against the silliness.

In other respects, it is the same old Spideyworld, with lots of swinging between skyscrapers and leading, as in all MCU films, to “apocalyptic but weirdly temporary destruction in the digitally confected big city”. It makes for an “entertaining spectacle” – but we could have done with “a more radical reboot”.