RogerEbert.com Says Brand New Day Is “Scared of Its Best Ideas” — And Gives It the Lowest Score On Our Tracker

Four reviews into our tracker, a pattern has been holding: real praise for Tom Holland and Zendaya, real complaints about pacing and franchise bloat. RogerEbert.com's Brian Tallerico just filed the most critical of the four — 2.5 out of 4 stars, the lowest score we've covered yet — and he backs it with the sharpest single diagnosis anyone has written about this film so far.

Tallerico is explicit that Holland isn't the problem. “The problem isn't that Spider-Boy needs to become Spider-Man—Holland proves more than up to the dramatic challenge of the shift,” he writes, “but that the producers and Destin Daniel Cretton seem often scared of their best ideas, under-developing too many of them.” That's a different complaint than “overstuffed” or “too busy” — it's an argument that the film has good instincts and doesn't trust them.

Here's what that argument actually covers: the specific new plot detail Tallerico's review adds to what we already know, why he thinks Cretton's tonal reset works better than the script around it, and where a 2.5-star, most-critical-yet review sits next to the three we've already broken down.

The Score: 2.5 Out of 4, the Lowest On Our Tracker

RogerEbert.com scores on a 4-star scale, so 2.5 lands as a mixed-to-positive “let down by specifics” review rather than a rave or a pan. It's also, numerically, softer than anything else we've covered: Den of Geek's David Crow gave it four out of five, while TIME and the Guardian run prose-only and can't be converted to a number directly — though both land closer to “qualified positive” than to this. Against the wider tracker, sitting around 90-91% on Rotten Tomatoes from more than seventy counted reviews, Tallerico's is a genuine outlier on the critical side, not just a softer version of the consensus.

Tallerico's Real Complaint Isn't Holland — It's Everyone Around Him

The review's clearest sentence is also its harshest: “Affection for the characters who have been around for four movies now goes a long way to holding ‘Brand New Day’ together, but it ultimately succumbs to one of the biggest problems of late-stage MCU: the feeling that it's just preparation for more movies.” That's a franchise-fatigue complaint, not a craft complaint — and Tallerico spends the rest of the review showing his work.

The producers and Destin Daniel Cretton seem often scared of their best ideas, under-developing too many of them on their way to what ultimately feels more transitional than impactful.

He extends that all the way to what comes next: the review notes the film is “surprisingly light on action set pieces that anyone will remember” by the time Avengers: Doomsday arrives — treating Brand New Day less as its own event and more as a bridge to one.

The New Detail: A Detective Named DeWolff, and a Question About “The Spider Side”

Brand New Day picks up after Doctor Strange's spell erased Peter Parker from the world's memory — Tallerico calls it “the MCU version of the 'Men in Black' neuralyzer.” MJ (Zendaya) and Ned (Jacob Batalon) remember Spider-Man saving them; they don't remember it was Peter, or their relationship to him. His review adds a detail we hadn't seen confirmed elsewhere: Peter's only real contact through his isolation is a detective named DeWolff, played by Liza Colón-Zayas, who's worried about his “intense loneliness.”

That isolation is the engine of what Tallerico calls the script's most interesting idea — and it matches Marvel's own official synopsis, which frames the whole film around "the pressure of seeing his old friends move on without him" sparking "a change in Peter he may not have the power to control": if Peter erases the things that made him a “man,” does the “spider” side start to take over? A villain forces him to confront his grief over losing MJ — not her death, but her forgetting him — and he starts to transform in ways he can't fully control. That sends him to consult the one person who knows what managing a dark side actually costs: Bruce Banner, aka the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). It's the same mentor dynamic our own read on Castle and Banner as competing father figures for Peter has been tracking, now with an on-page beat to back it.

The Villain Picture: A Body-Jumping Threat, and What Tallerico Won't Spoil

On the antagonist, Tallerico stays vague on purpose: “Spidey battles a deadly new enemy in the Big Apple: a villain who can jump from body to body and has its sights set on something or someone being held at the all-powerful Damage Control.” That detail now lines up with something more solid than critic inference: Marvel and Sony's own official synopsis describes “a shocking new threat to the city and those he loves — a powerful villain no one can even see.” A villain who jumps from body to body would, by definition, be a villain no one can pin down long enough to see coming — which is the closest thing to on-the-record confirmation our pre-release 'invisible villain' theory has gotten. Tallerico doesn't name a suspect, and neither will we.

He's similarly careful around Sadie Sink, calling her role “essential” and something that “could indicate a major shift in the MCU that feels overdue” — without using the word Marvel itself hasn't confirmed. Our own spoiler tracker already has that shift on the record: Jean Grey, sourced to an on-camera Steve Lacy quote rather than a studio statement. Tallerico's review doesn't contradict that. It just declines to be the outlet that says it outright.

Two smaller reveals round out the plot picture: a Florence Pugh cameo — Tallerico doesn't specify the role, but Pugh's MCU ties currently run through Yelena Belova — and a fight scene against Scorpion (Michael Mando) that the review calls “half-hearted.” Frank Castle, aka the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), is back too, mostly to “snarl while he blows things up.”

Cretton's Tonal Reset: Overcast Skies, No More Awkward Humor

Destin Daniel Cretton — who broke out with “Short Term 12” and went on to “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” and the Emmy-nominated “Wonder Man” — takes over directing duties here, and Tallerico credits him with an actual tonal shift, not just a new name in the chair. “A lot of the awkward humor of the other Holland films is gone,” he writes, and the choice runs through the filmmaking itself: overcast skies whenever Spidey swings through New York, TV on the Radio needle drops, and a Michael Giacchino score that leans into the change rather than smoothing it over.

Sadly, this isn't 'Spidey Term 12.'

That line is Tallerico's own, and it's doing real work: it's a compliment to Cretton's instincts and a complaint about the film's nerve in the same six words — the indie-drama sensibility that made his name is visible here, but the MCU machinery around it never fully lets it run.

Where the Cast Saves It

Holland gets the review's warmest specific praise: “invigorated by the dramatic shift,” giving what Tallerico calls “a dense, great performance, easily his best in this series” — and, notably, an actor who seems more excited by Peter's inner conflict than by Spider-Man's outer one. His chemistry with Zendaya “remains essential to what works here,” and Tallerico singles out how different this role is for her compared to “her tormented protagonists of late” — she and Batalon are credited with resetting the tone whenever the film gets “too lost in its own feelings.”

Sink gets the same specific treatment. Her character is framed as a mirror of Peter — “another riff on the 'great responsibility' of having unfathomable power,” in Tallerico's words — and he calls her “excellent,” comparing some of her beats to “Stranger Things” while crediting real growth as a performer. His read is that it's the young cast specifically, and how Cretton directs them, that holds the film together and makes it feel different from a standard MCU entry.

Where It Falls Apart: Action That Feels Like an Afterthought

The back half is where Tallerico's patience runs out. The requisite MCU business shows up on schedule — secondary cameos (Pugh included), action beats he says exist mainly “to keep the kids from getting bored by all the emo” — and none of it, in his account, is handled with the same care as the character work:

• The film's most notable action sequence arrives “remarkably late,” with few other genre beats standing out before it
• The Scorpion fight is “half-hearted,” and a Hulk scene “doesn't really land”
• Overall, Tallerico calls it “surprisingly light on action set pieces that anyone will remember” once Avengers: Doomsday arrives

How This Fits the Other Three Reviews

Line the four up and the shape gets clearer. Den of Geek's David Crow is the most enthusiastic, calling this Holland's best performance outright. TIME's Stephanie Zacharek lands in the middle, praising the actors while flagging almost the exact pacing and plot-density problems Tallerico does. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw goes further critical, arguing Zendaya “outshines” Holland. Tallerico's 2.5 stars make him the most critical of the four on the numbers — but his actual complaints aren't new ones. Every review on our tracker now agrees on the same two things: the cast and the direction are doing real work, and the film doesn't fully trust its own better instincts to carry the runtime.

So Should You See It?

Tallerico's own answer is a qualified yes. He closes by arguing that the MCU “doesn't exactly embrace change,” which makes Brand New Day's “baby steps” toward a more mature tone worth celebrating even where they don't go far enough — a massive blockbuster built, in the end, around one plain idea.

No one, not even the most powerful beings in the world, can go through this thing called life alone. It's not a 'brand new' idea, but it's a resonant one.

Between this, the Guardian's sharper notice, and Tom Holland spending the press tour framing this run as a victory lap, the honest picture four reviews in is a film critics keep calling good-not-great — with the same actors and the same director getting credit for the “good” part every single time.