Spider-Man: Brand New Day

A week ago, I went to see the latest Spidey movie, starring Tom Holland as your friendly neighborhood web-slinger, and let's see ... as of yesterday, it has grossed over $2 billion worldwide and is the highest-grossing film so far this year, the eighth-highest ever. It almost cracked $1 billion in its opening weekend, a second-best opener ever and the second-fastest to reach $1B, which it did in six days. And it's also the second-fastest film to crack $2B (19 days). So far, the reading from Wikipedia.

All that said, I doubt my synopsis will influence too many people sitting on the fence about seeing it, or spoil the plot for someone who still hasn't made it to the theater. I won't belabor it, other than to note a few pros and cons of the film. On the plus side, Spidey's lonely journey since making everybody who knew his secret identity forget him (including his best friend and the love of his life), plus his ongoing grief over losing Aunt May in the previous installment, give this film an intriguingly mature texture, and your heart aches for him a bit. The buddy rivalry between Spidey and the Punisher has a certain spicy charm. The action is well choreographed and shot, unmuddied by the bad CGI and flat color scheme that have detracted from so many recent superhero flicks. And though the plot does eventually come down to the "sometime hero turned apparent villain just needs a hug" thing that turned Doctor Strange In the Multiverse of Madness into such a fiasco, this movie somehow isn't a fiasco; it actually kind of works this time. The Hulk and a successor to the original Black Widow are also in here, one of them used to better advantage than the other, and Peter Parker gets a hard schooling (say, at a graduate level) in such subjects as letting the people he ensorcelled to forget him go on with their lives, forgetting him, and letting the changes happening in his body run their natural course. That's all good.

What I'd complain about, and you know how I like to complain, is the casting of Sadie Sink as Jean Grey. The whole timeline of this series doesn't make sense to me. Apparently, this is a setup for a whole new X-Men origins story, and so we get a snot-nosed brat version of Jean Grey rather than the Woman, with a capital W, Famke Janssen played in the early 2000s X-Men movies.

And so, without at all offering any sort of synopsis, here are the Three Scenes That Made It For Me: (1) Peter's sometime best friend, Ned, reveals how the knowledge that Spider-Man has saved his and MJ's lives a disproportionate number of times, abstracted from any knowledge of who Spidey really is, has messed with his mind. He gone full conspiracy-theory nut about it, and even wrote a Spidey tracker app that plays the theme music from the 1960s animated Spider-Man series. (2) Peter and Frank (as he knows the Punisher) beat up on each other while racing to catch, each in his own special way, a bad guy who threatens to bust open the prison that holds all the super-bad guys in New York. (3) The same dynamite duo, to use that word in the sense that suggests massive property destruction, battle both the Hulk and Jean Grey in a high-rise office building. Of dull moments there are few.