Spidey Gets His Spark Back: Movie Review
- Vero Minute
- 2 hours ago
- 1 min read
PUCKETT'S MOVIE PICKS
Mark Puckett reviews Spider-Man: Brand New Day
Having scraped together a billion dollars in under a week, the latest Marvel exercise arrives as a rare, thoughtful pleasure amid the franchise's recent mediocrity. Yet at two hours and twenty-five minutes, it suffers from a mild case of bloat. Nothing drags, strictly speaking, making it a good film, if not quite a great one. The editing is seamless, the casting entirely unoffending, and while I was never bored, I was rarely electrified. Call it a solid upper-crust entry in the sprawling 38-film MCU catalog.
A few Avengers drop by, though the Hulk’s CGI has the uncanny, plastic sheen of a mid-tier action figure. Much of the narrative wrestles with Spidey’s love-amnesia regarding MJ, indulging heavily in the Zendaya-Holland fervor; it is cute, if slightly self-satisfied.
Where the picture surprisingly succeeds is in its gritty, "authentic" New York texture, a triumph of digital wizardry, given that most of it was conjured on British soundstages using CGI and AI to fake the Brooklyn Bridge. It had me fooled.
Next time, shave off thirty minutes; still, for a Marvel-starved public, this pleasantly bland outing easily does the trick.
Rating: 4.6 Pucks
