A Little Body Horror and Back to Street-Level Action for Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man
Best MCU movie in years without grading on a scale. Seriously, Spider-Man: Brand New Day has delivered. If I had any faith in the MCU as a whole, I’d say that Thunderbolts * and Fantastic Four: First Steps were moves in the right direction and that SM:BND is a full-on course correction, but the Marvel Beast has grown into an unwieldy animal, misshapen, clumsy, and sporting more wrinkles (in development and execution) than any critter its age should. That said, those previous two films, for all their faults and honestly, there aren’t that many, delivered a semblance of why Marvel flicks are worth going to. Sure, there is some serious plot-armor, motivations that don’t always make sense, relationships that feel more contrived than organic, but they delivered overall in the areas that matter. The previous two films had well-developed characters and reasonable but not-Earth-shattering stakes (sorry, but Galactus is still not getting the role h...