What can be said about a new Spider-Man movie besides, in a tone of incredulity, “It’s another one!”

Well, a few things. Spider-Man: Brand New Day was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, who also did Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), which I enjoyed. It was lighthearted and humorous, with excellent action sequences and nice low-key character work, and it made a movie star, briefly, of Simu Liu. I’d like to see more movies with Simu Liu, by the way, and I don’t mean when he’s playing bit parts like one of the Kens in Barbie (2023), or one of the crowd of Avengers, as he will be in his return as Shang-Chi in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. It’s nice that he’s making a living and all, but the way Hollywood wastes charismatic charm is a sin and a shame.

Young stars getting much more career cosseting are Tom Holland and Zendaya, who return for the fourth entry in this latest rebooted Spider-Man series, after the trilogy Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019), and Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021). Playing Spider-Man/Peter Parker and his snarky beloved Michelle “MJ” Jones-Watson in this start of a new trilogy — my gods, it’s relentless — Holland and Zendaya are reaching a professional zenith after their much-publicized marriage and their performances in the epic hit The Odyssey, which opened just a few weeks ago and is still showing on rival screens.

They’re both far better in Spider-Man: Brand New Day. That squeaky-clean nice-guy tenor in a gee-whiz American accent adopted by Holland — who’s a Brit — in order to play Peter Parker is odd and distracting when he’s enacting the role of Telemachus, prince of Ithaca, the callow son of Odysseus, but it’s just right as part of the cartoon fun of Spider-Man movies. And Zendaya is, of course, beautiful, but playing the goddess Athena as Christopher Nolan wrote her, as a glumly concerned onlooker with nothing goddess-y to do, did not serve her. She’s wonderfully modern in affect and has nice comic timing. She and Holland have a relaxed bantering style together that’s sweet and entertaining.

The best thing about Spider-Man: Brand New Day is that it’s not trying to be anything more than gleeful fun, packing high-energy action, frequent laughs, and plenty of emotive drama into a polished entertainment package. There’s very little of that silly fake profundity you have to put up with when certain directors who shall remain nameless take over a superhero movie. And it’s already a colossal hit, setting a box-office record on opening day that beats another box-office record previously set by a Marvel movie, Avengers: Endgame (2019).

Spider-Man: Brand New Day follows up on the plot ending from the last of these movies, efficiently summed up in a few lines appearing in the opening credit imagery, when Dr Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) cast a spell making the world forget the identity of Peter Parker, which had leaked out with potentially disastrous consequences. The result is that Spider-Man can go on efficiently fighting crime in New York City with nobody knowing his true identity. But that includes the people in Peter’s personal life — girlfriend MJ and their former MIT classmate and pal Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) included.

Since his supportive aunt May (Marisa Tomei) has died as a result of her connection to Spider-Man, Peter now lives a life of monkish isolation dedicated only to his lonely pursuit of dangerous baddies. His most intimate connection is the police detective Jean DeWolff (Liza Colón-Zayas), who talks to him on the phone about the latest heists and dangers to the public thoroughfares.

This is a superhero plot we’ve seen a million times — the figure idolized by the public for his unbeatable speed, strength, and constant heroics who’s nevertheless living a life of abject misery and alienation, and must find his way back to some sort of basic human connection in order to save himself. We like the dark romance of this character, just like we are endlessly diverted by stories of movie stars who seem to have everything — beauty, money, fame, adulation — but are revealed to have been deeply troubled and unhappy all along.

The trials of Peter Parker/Spider-Man don’t end there, though. He’s also got a potentially deadly problem that’s arising from his angst, which is the spiking of stress-related arachnid hormones in his system, making his spidery qualities erratic and excessive. Suddenly he’s shooting spiderwebs out of his wrists, not his suit, and he can’t control the quantities — sometimes nothing spurts out, sometimes it’s web in such profusion he’s waking up cocooned in it, hanging off the edges of buildings.

He experiments with scientific fixes, and there are amusing scenes of trial and error as he lurches and plummets and blasts off wildly all around the city. But it’s a bad time to lose control of his powers, because there’s a mysterious new force of mayhem at work in New York, an invisible human-possessing force that can jump rapidly from person to person, causing each person to flop back and forth when overtaken or abandoned, like one of those wildly waving inflatable tube men advertising used cars or something. So Spider-Man has no idea who this apparent foe is, as he’s repeatedly confronted by some random person on the street looking at him mockingly, challenging him to keep up, and saying witheringly, “You are a simple spider.”

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of time for Peter/Spidey to moon around tracking MJ and Ned and feeling extra sad. This is made easier by Ned’s always-online presence and Spider-Man fandom, which includes his invention of a smartphone “Spidey-Tracker,” which will come in useful at various points.

There’s top talent popping out all over in this film, which is one of the long-standing pleasures of Hollywood genre movies — tremendously gifted actors showing up in small roles giving casually terrific performances. Florence Pugh is, as always, fabulous as Yelena Belova/Black Widow, here playing a few scenes humorously lounging in a spa pool she calls “my office” and dismissing the small potatoes — no, make that the “leetle baby potatoes” — that Spider-Man concerns himself with while the Avengers deal with global “big potatoes” problems. Somehow the light, pop quality of the character makes Pugh’s extraordinary acting gifts even more startling than when she’s playing a more demanding role.

Mark Ruffalo brings all kinds of shadings to his Bruce Banner/Hulk performance because he’s apparently a mensch who never just phones it in before collecting his enormous payment for a few scenes. And Sadie Sink of Stranger Things has a major role I can’t describe because it’s a spoiler, but she’s very effective. TV talent is strongly represented here, with Tramell Tillman bringing his enigmatic qualities over from Severance, and Liza Colón-Zayas of The Bear doing remarkably heartwarming work in a generic good-cop role.

The one performance I could’ve done without was Jon Bernthal’s Frank Castle/Punisher, whose macho vigilantism is so broad stroke in its belligerence, it became annoying that Peter/Spidey keeps trusting him. Bernthal — who was also in The Odyssey, playing Menelaus as a vengeful brute — seems to turn up everywhere these days, enacting variations on toxic masculinity. Not Bernthal’s fault he has that broken-nosed roughneck look, I guess, but what a way to make a living!

But if you’re looking for totally undemanding entertainment, there are a number of pleasantly distracting aspects of Spider-Man: Brand New Day to keep you going through the movie’s very long, typically plot-laden running time. You’ve got to remember not to let your mind wander, however — above all, don’t think about the dire state of cinema or the even more dire state of the world while you watch.

Because if you love movies, this endless superhero movie juggernaut is, and has long been, exhausting and depressing because it sucks up all the money, talent, energy, and press coverage, leaving leftover crumbs for all the other potentially more ambitious cinematic endeavors. And if you let yourself dwell on the enormous resources dedicated to these distracting cinematic circuses we attend when we’re in the midst of about six different deadly global crises that threaten all life on earth, you’ll feel ill thinking what all that money could do if we weren’t constantly, willfully, flushing it all away.

And that definitely won’t help you stay engaged in how Spider-Man will catch the body-hopping menace, or whether Peter Parker will ever get up the nerve to tell MJ about their lost love.

Sometimes, we’ve got to admit, we’re dying for some idle distraction.