All posts by One Guys Opinion

Dr. Frank Swietek is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dallas, where he is regarded as a particularly tough grader. He has been the film critic of the University News since 1988, and has discussed movies on air at KRLD-AM (Dallas) and KOMO-AM (Seattle). He is also the Founding President of the Dallas-Fort Worth Film Critics' Association, a group of print and broadcast journalists covering film in the Metroplex area, and was a charter member of the Society of Texas Film Critics. Dr. Swietek is a member of the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS). He was instrumental in the creation of the Lone Star Awards, which, through the efforts of the Dallas-Fort Worth Regional Film Commission, give recognition annually to the best feature films and television programs produced in Texas.
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SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

Producers: Kevin Feige, Amy Pascal, Avi Arad and Rachel O’Connor   Director: Destin Daniel Cretton   Screenplay: Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers   Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Tramell Tillman, Mark Ruffalo, Liza Colón-Zayas, Michael Mando, Zabryna Guevara, Florence Pugh, Fan Xiaoshuang, Marvin Jones III, Eman Esfandi and Marisa Tomei   Distributor: Sony/Columbia Pictures

Grade: B

“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” is a coming-of-age movie in a couple of respects.  The young characters at the center of the plot—Peter Parker (Tom Holland), of course, but also a girl (Sadie Sink) forced, like him, to deal with traumatic loss—must learn to leave adolescence behind and mature into adulthood, accepting things as they are and moving on from obsessing about them.

Moreover, the movie, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton from a screenplay by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, represents a coming-of-age for the franchise.  It doesn’t do away with the penchant for humor that’s always marked the Spider-Man movies (Peter’s flippancy in fight mode is on full display), but the overall lighthearted tone that’s marked previous efforts, from Sam Raimi’s 2002 movie to 2021’s “No Way Home,” notwithstanding some pretty grim moments, is largely abandoned here. Although Cretton’s film, 2021’s “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” was one of the bouncier installments in the MCU, this “Day” is a darker-than-expected one.

Thankfully, it also jettisons most of the multiverse nonsense that’s plagued the Marvel Universe.  To be sure, it has to contend with the amnesia spell cast by Dr. Strange at the close of “No Way Home,” which led Peter’s girlfriend MJ (Zendaya, formidable) and his high school best friend Ned (reliably goofy Jacob Batalon), as well as everyone else, to forget him.  That, combined with the tragic death of his beloved Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), has left him alone and grieving his losses.

To compensate he’s thrown himself manically into his crime-fighting role as Spider-Man, making him the hero of New York City as he collaborates with Detective DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas) of the NYPD to take down evildoers major and minor, whether ordinary bank robbers or the notorious Scorpion (Michael Mando, from “Spider-Man: Homecoming”).

The latter reappears in Spidey’s first big action sequence here, as he tries to stop a massive tank careening through the city streets toward the Damage Control building, which houses an agency headed by smooth-talking Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), whose goal is to retrain captured criminals, like the band of evil, red-gowned ninjas called The Hand (headed by Fan Xiaoshuang) for law-enforcement purposes.

It turns out, however, that the tank was actually controlled by some mysterious mastermind, who can jump from possessed host to possessed host to make them do whatever their invisible master desires.  The crux of the plot is Peter’s effort to unmask the villain and his motive—which, as it happens, isn’t quite so simple a matter.

Conjoined with this plot thread are two others.  One is Peter’s anguished desire to reconnect in some fashion with MJ and Ned, though both have moved on with their lives. (He’s positively crushed when he sees MJ with a handsome boyfriend played by Eman Esfandi.)  The other, which becomes intertwined with that, is the fact that Peter’s body is changing, with the arachnid DNA becoming increasingly powerful and sometimes overwhelming his ability to control its uber-aggressiveness, as well as its natural, rather than technological, web-spinning.  Though the script adds some pratfalls and jokes to the mix, Peter’s worries about what’s happening to him are deadly earnest. 

It’s his hope to invent an inhibitor that will enable him to tamp down those impulses that persuades Peter to consult Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), the scientist-turned-professor who’s created such a device to subdue his alter-ego The Hulk.  Banner’s reintroduction is but one element of the movie’s abundant fan service; it allows for a brutal action sequence featuring the not-so-jolly Green Giant.

But even that’s secondary to the huge role played by Jon Benthal’s Frank Castle, aka The Punisher, the cynical vigilante introduced in a Disney+ series and portrayed here as Spidey’s crusty rival who becomes, for various reasons, his reluctant but ultimately supportive comrade-in-arms.  Bernthal’s presence—most welcome, given the actor’s grumpily engaging performance—is only one instance of characters recruited from the fringes (i.e., the non-cinematic elements) of the MCU—the Daredevil streaming series is another example.  The mysterious mastermind behind the possession aspect of the plot is related to another Marvel property, the X-Men, though it wouldn’t be fair to reveal how.  It’s also connected to an apparent plan to reboot that franchise, which went understandably silent after the dismal “Dark Phoenix” in 2019.

The emphasis on Peter’s coming-of-age in “Day” doesn’t mean, you can be assured, that the movie stints on action.  The fights that Cretton oversaw in “Shang-Chi” were balletically memorable, and those he’s crafted with cinematographer Brett Pawlak, production designer Charles Wood, editors Nat Sanders, Gina Sansom and Harry Yoon and the visual effects team headed by Jerome Chen here are equally so.  The CGI work is easily among the best yet, with the swinging scenes through Big Apple streets outclassing anything managed before, and Michael Giacchino’s score doesn’t let the visuals down. Sanja Milković Hays’s costumes are also fine; Spidey’s outfit seems newly minted.

But despite the excellence of the action sequences, the heart of the movie is Peter Parker’s personal journey, and Holland carries it off beautifully, melding determination and vulnerability in equal measure.  He’s been an actor to watch ever since his stunning debut in J. A. Bayona’s “The Impossible” (2012), and though he’s had a few stumbles over the years, he’s fulfilled that early promise, his natural boyishness allowing him to play younger than his years convincingly, as witnessed in his Telemachus in “The Odyssey” as well as Peter Parker.  But now “Brand New Day” serves as an invitation for him, and those behind the MCU, to deal with the further maturation of Parker in future installments.  Whether Kevin Feige will take up that challenge remains uncertain; “Day” ends with only an enigmatic stinger and a caption telling us blandly that Spider-Man will return—though how, precisely, is left unsaid.

Whatever the future holds, however, Cretton and Holland have given the character a solid new installment in his saga.  At nearly two-and-a-half hours their film sometimes tries one’s patience, and one might have preferred a bit more levity and a mite less sentimentality along the way (the latter especially toward the close).  But thanks to excellent work from its director and star, the movie skillfully balances its combination of Peter Parker’s rite-of-passage and Spider-Man’s superheroics, making for another satisfying chapter in the franchise.  Indeed, it’s good enough to make one look forward to a continuation of both aspects of the character’s evolution.     

Now Showing

MOTOR CITY

Producers: Greg Silverman, Jon Berg, Cliff Roberts, Chad St. John, Alan Ritchson and Joshua Harris   Director: Potsy Ponciroli   Screenplay: Chad St. John   Cast: Alan Ritchson, Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster, Pablo Schreiber, Lionel Boyce, Amar Chadha-Patel, Ben McKenzie, Dominic Bogart, Mister Fitzgerald and Rafael Cebrián   Distributor: IFC

Grade: C-

When Macbeth speaks of a tale “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he might have been pointing a finger at this movie, a thoroughly vacuous distillation of B-movie grindhouse tropes with a plot so thin it can be written on a small-sized napkin.  But it wouldn’t be accurate to include Shakespeare’s phrase that it’s a tale “told by an idiot,” because scripter Chad St. John and director Potsy Ponciroli know what they’re up to and have enlisted a cast and crew—production designer Mayne Burke, costumer Amy Roth, cinematographer John Matysiak and editor Joe Galdo—crafty enough to pull off their peculiar vision.

That vision makes the picture a stunt in two ways.  First, it’s mostly dialogue-free.  Not that it’s soundless.  There are a few words spoken, and lots of grunts, groans and other noises during the numerous action scenes. (The sound design is by David Tirolo.) And the music is virtually non-stop.  Most of the first two-thirds on the soundtrack are needle drops of pop songs (supposedly selected by Jack White, who also has a cameo tinkling the keyboard), but in the latter stages they’re replaced by Steve Jablonsky’s moody, explosive synthesizer score.

Then there are the visuals.  Every frame of the movie looks artificial, as though each sequence represented a sequence of panels from a graphic novel brought to life, frequently in slow-motion.  (Think of it as a second cousin to Robert Rodriguez’s “Sin City.”)  Presumably the look is the result of collaboration between Ponciroli, Maltysiak and the visual effects team headed by Bernie Kimbacher, but when combined with the almost-no-words gimmick it makes for a real oddity.

As to the narrative, it begins in 1977 Detroit with a prologue in which ultra-beefy hero John Miller (Alan Ritchson) tosses the corpse of scurvy police detective Savick (Pablo Schreiber) off the roof of an office building into the street below.   He then descends to the pavement to confront drug kingpin Reynolds (Ben Foster), who’s speeding down the street in his muscle car.  Their battle, which ends with John’s firing bullets, as well as an engagement ring that reappears throughout the movie, through the windshield, will be repeated at the film’s close, though it will be followed by a ludicrous epilogue.

Then we see the reason behind the mayhem.  John, a Vietnam vet and ex-con, has humiliated the brutal Reynolds by stealing his girlfriend, a floozy named Sophia (Shailene Woodley), who under his benign influence transforms herself into a good girl waitress.    

But at the very moment John is presenting that ring to the overjoyed Sophia, a tear gas cannister crashes through the window of their house, followed by a SWAT team that arrests Miller for transporting drugs.  Reynolds, in connivance with Savick, has framed him, and soon takes his absence as an invitation to woo back the suspiciously changeable Sophia, who becomes his overdressed trophy squeeze.  He also takes the opportunity to come to the police station to taunt John, who’s soon ensconced in a brutal prison under a twenty-five-year sentence.

But his old war buddies Youngblood (Lionel Boyce) and Singh (Amar Chadha-Patel), who come out of nowhere, help him arrange an escape—a totally absurd affair that nonetheless allows for what one assumes is a cheeky joke when the prison’s name is revealed as Brubaker years before that reform-minded Robert Redford movie will come out.  (Less amusing is the decision to name Savick’s three corrupt confederates, played by Dominic Bogart, Mister Fitzgerald and Rafael Cebrián, Porthos, Aramis and Athos.)

An attempt to rescue Sophia, now tired of Reynold’s cruelty, from his mansion has a tragic result, leading to a hyper-violent confrontation between John, Youngblood and Singh on the one hand, and Savick and his thugs on the other.  That leads to the repetition of the prologue and the idiotic epilogue, marred by some terrible makeup and a few lines of dialogue bad enough to make you glad that the movie was mostly word-free until then.

That simple frame-up and revenge tale is interrupted by a single subplot involving Kent (Ben McKenzie), a straight-arrow cop who challenges Savick’s case against John.  The thread adds nothing meaningful to the script, telling us nothing we didn’t already know, and is the occasion for the most irritating of all the needle drops, a portion of the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem, which has become one of cinema’s worst musical clichés.  Filmmakers, please stop using Wolfgang’s beautiful piece for your shorthand.

“Motor City” has drive to spare, but little beneath the hood except the incessant musical racket.  The characters are comic-book sketches, led by Ritchson’s Miller, whose two expressions are smiles during the rare happy moments, and a grim determination everywhere else; he’s a modern-day Dolph Lundgren.  Woodley sports some glitzy duds thanks to Roth, but her role is merely decorative too.  Savick makes a sleazy villain and the lesser supporting players get by, but only Foster really gets into the over-the-top swing of things; subtlety has never been the prime element in the actor’s toolbox, but here he makes no pretense of it, giving a turn so outrageously operatic that it gives opera a bad name.  (Watch for his hilarious dance scene.)

The wordless gimmick inevitably brings comparisons to John Woo’s 2023 “Silent Night,” but that movie had a narrative excuse for the lack of dialogue—the protagonist has lost his voice to a bullet to the throat—and Woo, no doubt recognizing the banality of any dialogue that would fill such a vigilante revenge tale, obviously relished the chance to concentrate exclusively on his métier, the choreography of violent action, which he delivered in spades.   His exercise goes on too long, becoming increasingly dotty in the process, but its “realistic” visuals have punch, and he intersperses them with flashbacks that lend the plot some emotional heft.  What prompted Ponciroli to adopt his approach is unclear, but the result has none of Woo’s imaginative zest or his reach for human feeling.  “Motor City” is just garish cinematic wheel-spinning.