There are times in "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" when you might find yourself missing Spider-Man.

This is one of those superhero mashup movies where, at times, there are four or five comic book characters all onscreen at once, like a superhero royal rumble. And there are times when the webslinger is sorely missed while the movie spends its time building up [REDACTED] and their storyline.

Yes, [REDACTED], because there's a big ol' spoiler in this movie that we reviewers have been asked not to talk about, whose mere name would be a spoiler of things happening and things to come in the Marvel space. Oh, whoever can it be?

Well, it's not Spider-Man, and that's the biggest problem with the fourth installment of this version of the Spidey story, and the 11th stand-alone "Spider-Man" film (including animated movies but not including Spidey roles, big and small, in other affiliated stories) since 2002.

Tom Holland's Peter Parker — and to say Holland is a great Peter Parker and that he tends to lack onscreen anytime when he's not Peter Parker would be an understatement — picks up where we left him: on his own.

With the help of Dr. Strange at the end of 2021's "Spider-Man: No Way Home," the world's memories of Spidey's identity have been collectively erased, rendering Peter a stranger to his girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya) and his best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon). Those two are now off at MIT together, and Spider-Man is stuck battling crime in New York City, watching MJ and Ned live their lives through social media posts.

Yes, this Spider-Man's main nemesis is FOMO, and he's spending as much time gazing into his screen as we all are in our daily lives. The movie is deft in the way it handles Spider-Man dispensing with villains as a throwaway side plot (his relationship with detective Jean DeWolff, played by "The Bear's" Liza Colón-Zayas, is a bright spot) and focusing on Peter's feelings of longing as the main storyline propeller.

At the same time, Peter is looking to regulate the levels of Spidey-ness (not a technical term) in his body, and his research leads him to the classroom of Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), who knows a little something about suppressing and keeping a lid on the mutated forces in his body. (Banner also doesn't remember Peter, because of the Strange spell.)

Oh, and Jon Bernthal's Punisher is hanging around, too, as a rough-and-tumble sidekick of Spidey's. Their stories are all intertwined, and "Brand New Day's" plot threading is busy but manageable. But then along comes [REDACTED] and disrupts the balance of the storytelling.

It's well understood at this point that the Marvel movies are all strung together and one leads to another leads to another and it's all a giant web (ha!) and so on. But at this point in the "Spider-Man" saga, we're plenty invested in the main characters, and it feels cheap to farm out so much of the screen time to the introduction of [REDACTED] and their story, and to bloat the movie's runtime up to the two-and-a-half hour mark.

Alas, when "Brand New Day" is cooking, it's cooking. Director Destin Daniel Cretton (who graduated from "Short Term 12" to helming "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings") knows how to balance action and emotion, and there's genuine feelings of loss and sadness in the interactions between Peter, MJ and Ned. This is also a gritty-looking "Spider-Man," with a grimier-looking New York than what is usually portrayed on camera.

The Marvel story, of course, moves on, and "Brand New Day" helps get it where it's going. But our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, bless his heart, deserves a little better.

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'SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY'

Grade: B

MPA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of action/violence and some language)

Running time: 2:25

How to watch: In theaters July 31

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