BLUF: Hot 6/10. A decent superhero movie with interesting moments which, in the end, doesn’t take any risks and ends up telling the same safe story. Weightless.

I’d heard good things about this movie. And as it got released on streaming, it became impossible to avoid spoilers, and I happened to have some free time, so I watched it.

Beware: spoilers from here on out.

First, the shots themselves. Some of them looked interesting, unlike what you’d see in a typical Marvel-Disney superhero movie: specifically, MJ being mind-controlled on the rooftop, or Peter web-swinging and crying in the rain. They weren’t clean, with every corner lit just so you could see the Samsung and BMW branding; they had more character to them. Many Marvel movies share the same recognisable, generic look, and some scenes here broke away from it.

Speaking of product placement, there is one shot where Spider-Man takes the train to the poorer suburbs, and a big BMW banner towers over dirty buildings. I had to pause there: it felt too real, almost cynical. We live in cities where huge billboards pollute the view, and so do the heroes. A giant BMW banner blocking the sight is as much a problem for us as it is for the fictional New York. The fact that it’s a paid product placement turns the moment into a weird commentary on capitalism and advertisement.

Another sign of the times is Peter using tools of mass surveillance to find his criminals. He basically feeds the footage from the city cameras into his system, running facial recognition and data-processing algorithms on faces of citizens. It is used as a plot device, meant to point our main character to the places he’s supposed to go. There is no critique of that, and the one time we could have got a moment of pushback, it is played off as a joke. I am sure his software violates numerous GDPR regulations, he is not authorised to process that data at all, and the city is complicit in not trying to put an end to it. It is interesting: when Batman built a city-wide surveillance system in The Dark Knight, the film treated it as a line that shouldn’t be crossed, and had the machine destroyed at the end. Here it is given as just another useful tool in the hands of the police and our vigilante. It is 2026, and mainstream media presenting a mass surveillance tool as something good is a fair bit concerning.

Fight scenes look great when you pause them. The shots are meticulously crafted, well thought out and beautifully composed. Unfortunately, they end too quickly when you press play again. Except for one fight, there is no energy to them; they feel empty. Let’s look at the scene that works, to figure out what’s missing in the rest: the second-to-last fight, where Peter faces the Hand and the faceless henchmen of the Bad Guys without his full powers unlocked. The choreography is great. The pacing has build-ups, moments of suspension, and then the release, the pay-off. The action comes in bursts almost too fast to follow, then everything slows for a beat, holding on a single pose or a single hit just long enough for you to take it in, before snapping back to full speed. The camera is doing a great job as well, following the hero and the henchmen around, showcasing impossible feats of martial prowess.. It all feels very anime-inspired, which is for the best.

The other fight scenes miss that. Even the scene that directly follows, the too-long-expected moment where Peter awakens his full potential, is more of a superpowers showcase than a choreographed dance. It stops being a visual spectacle and turns into a checklist the movie has to follow. Powers awakened? Done. Ninjas defeated? Done. Henchmen incapacitated? Done. Now quick, on to the next scene, the plot needs to happen!

Another example is the Hulk fight. Both of them actually, the one with the mind controlled one, and with the enraged one. The punches don’t carry weight, and the grey office building devolves into a dusty, forgettable background (the outside looks cool, though). There is no story told there, no ups and downs, no emotions felt by the characters. And yes, there is plenty of acting and feelings just before the fight breaks out and as it ends, but it’s missing from the duel itself. The whole sequence is reduced to a writing device that takes the plot from A to B.

A pet peeve on the above: it’s hard to judge how strong the Hulk is. Sometimes he easily snaps the webs, sometimes he can’t. In one moment he’s super quick, with lightning reflexes; in the next he’s not able to land a punch.

The action sequences I do want to praise are the web-slinging parts. I have to admit, they are the best I’ve seen in a live-action movie. There’s just something about how they show the height. I don’t have a fear of heights, but I got nervous watching him sit on the edge of a rooftop, or jump from skyscraper to skyscraper. These moments are so dynamic: you can feel the wind, the speed, the distances. The first few swinging sequences feel like those dreams in which you can fly.

The writing is the weakest part of the movie.

They’ve turned the Punisher into Pimento from Brooklyn Nine-Nine: a tough, crazy, brutal comic-relief guy who, deep down, is a good friend. And by brutal I mean Disney-friendly brutal: he just fires an assault rifle instead of a Futuristic Gun That Doesn’t Kill People (a common, family-friendly weapon of choice for our heroes). He felt like a different character wearing a recognisable suit for the audience to point at. We must consume familiar IPs; glory to the Ouroboros of pop culture devouring its own tail. The Hand got a similar treatment. See those red ninjas we got the rights to? Enjoy how they try to murder our main character (careful, no blood allowed!) and how they pose for our trailer shots! What’s their story? Who are they, really? We do not know and we do not care.

For those who haven’t watched: the main villains are Mr Milchick from Severance and Jean Grey. Jean is a misunderstood telepath who wants to find her missing sister, abducted by Damage Control (an SCP-type organisation, led by the aforementioned Milchick). She will stop at nothing to find her sibling: she will kill and sow destruction, she will control people’s minds, use them, and sacrifice them like pawns.

In the end, Peter tells her that she’s not a killer, that she doesn’t have to kill Milchick. That is an empty statement, meant to solve all the problems with the power of friendship and redeem a ruthless villain because she’s needed in a future movie. Let me just go through what she did along the way: drove a tank through New York, shooting left and right; blew up an office building (twice!); forced two people to attempt suicide while she was controlling them (luckily saved by Spider-Man, so apparently it doesn’t count); sexually assaulted MJ and Peter; and finally took half the city hostage, threatening to kill them. That list is incomplete, but you get the gist. So you can see why the redemption feels unearned.

I have a petty grievance with the Aunt May flashback. Peter remembers Aunt May telling him that having powers can be rough and lonely, but that he will always have people who love him. Later, Jean finds this memory in his head and is so moved by it that she decides to stop her killing rampage and go on a redemption arc instead. We must truly appreciate the foresight of Aunt May: she chose to use gender-neutral language and to leave Peter’s name out of that memory, so that one day it could speak just as well to someone else who happens to invade her nephew’s head. 10/10.

I don’t like the final shot (a bullet shot, not a camera shot) in the movie either. The Punisher, as fate would have it, finds a rooftop which, as fate would have it, overlooks the Super Secret Containment Lab, which, as fate would have it, has had its wall blown off in such a way that he has a clear angle on his target. Let’s take a moment to appreciate our hero’s luck, arriving just when he needs it. He fires, aiming to kill Jean, but Peter heroically takes the bullet for her, shielding her with his own body. He takes a full .50 calibre round, which conveniently leaves no exit wound, since one would have rendered his sacrifice useless. Luckily for him, and for Disney, who surely have a lot of Spider-Man movies planned, the wound is not fatal. It turns out the wonders of modern medicine can do a lot, even if you’ve been lying in a literal puddle of your own blood and are rushed to the hospital at the speed of a guy walking, who just aura-farms while holding you in his arms instead of calling an ambulance.

The MJ/Ned plot felt weird. It wasn’t bad, but it didn’t read as sad as the writers wanted it to. When Peter stalks Ned and MJ on Instagram, it gives off more of a creepy vibe. I guess they really needed to show how useful a brand-new foldable phone can be (courtesy of Samsung I think), even if the scenes didn’t fit the plot. I have to admit, though, that when he starts becoming friends with the two again, it’s genuinely heartwarming. And I respect the writers for not having MJ fall for Peter again, although I suspect they’ll be dating within a movie or two. Did Brand New Day undo the permanent and irreversible consequences of the spell from No Way Home? Kind of. “You look like best friends,” says MJ to Peter and Ned after they’ve been hanging out for five minutes. See how easy it is to build a friendship when you’re a comic book character who can’t stray from the status quo for too long?

There is one thing in the plot that I like: the V Max. Jean, our Redeemable Villain, is searching for her sister, who is being held at CIA Damage Control. The only clue she has is “V Max”, a message she received from her telepathically. However, the director of CIA Damage Control knows nothing about it, and no one is able to find out anything. The grim realisation of what it means comes when Jean herself is tortured by CIA Damage Control. Held in a room, she looks up and notices the VentMax branding on a vent. That vent was the last thing her sister saw; it was what her dying mind projected in its last telepathic spasm. What we believed to be an important plot clue turns out to be a gut punch.

Writing this review, I almost forgot about the mutation that Spider-Man undergoes. Don’t worry, I think the movie did too. It is inconsequential: it results only in a slightly different-looking web and Tom Holland wearing black contact lenses a few times. The whole subplot, to which the movie dedicates about 40 minutes, carries no significance and no weight.

To sum up, the movie was a weightless theme park ride. Don’t get me wrong, it was enjoyable. But at times it was so frustrating. Do I feel like I wasted my time watching it? Ever so slightly.