Spider-Man: Brand New Day Review

Cretton's best decision is to shoot the thing like a crime picture. The camera stays low and close, the swinging is weighted and legible instead of weightless, and the practical stunt work in the mid film chase gives the action a bruised quality the previous entries traded away for spectacle. Several reviewers call it the best looking film the studio has released in years, and that is not flattery. Holland is quieter here than he has ever been allowed to be, and the Punisher pairing hands him something to argue against rather than someone to trade quips with.

What critics fault is structural. At nearly two and a half hours the middle sags under backstory, the villain's scheme collapses the moment anyone examines the logistics, and a film that spends an hour earning its street level scale then spends twenty minutes wiring itself back into everything else. Zendaya gets the film's warmest scenes and too few of them, and Jacob Batalon is reduced to errands. The reset works anyway, because the emotional line is clear and the filmmaking is confident, but the discipline runs out well before the running time does.