Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a relief. That is also the trap.

Holland’s third solo outing works because it is smaller. The machine around it is already trying to make it huge again.

I walked into Brand New Day ready to be tired. We have done the joke. We have done the cameo stack. We have done the young man who cannot catch a break in a city that is also a merchandising plan. What I got instead was a Spider-Man movie that remembers the job is a kid, a city, and a problem that can be photographed from a fire escape.

It is not a small movie in the budget sense. It is small in the moral sense. Peter is allowed to want a night off without the fate of a slate depending on his homework. The action has weight. The jokes do not wink so hard they leave a bruise. Sadie Sink’s Jean Grey cameo is the one piece of universe business that actually changes the temperature in the room, and even that plays like a rumor the city has not agreed on yet.

The best thing the movie does is refuse to be the universe for two hours.

The trap is what happens next. A clean, liked Spider-Man movie is catnip for the people who schedule December. They will call this proof the brand is healthy and then ask it to tow Doomsday, an X-Men announcement, and every wounded subplot that needs a friendly neighborhood ambulance. Relief is not a strategy. It is a weekend.

See it in IMAX if you can, because the wet brick and the swing lines are the point. Then let it be a movie for a minute before we turn it into a press release for the next four years.