Captain America: Brave New World.
I know that it’s pretty uncool these days to love Marvel movies, but I don’t care - for the most part, I love them. I grew up reading Marvel comics. I still remember for one Christmas, my mom got me a box of used comics (maybe 50?) and I treasured that box. I read those books from cover to cover, countless times, falling in love with characters like Spider-Man, The Punisher, Iron Man, and many other characters we’ve seen grace the MCU. Sure, there have been some missteps - the second Iron Man, the second Thor flick, and a few others, but overall they’ve been a pretty good time.
Once the first “phase” was over, and the Endgame credits rolled, Marvel seemed to be in a state of…”what now?”. Understandable, considering they’d wrapped up a storyline that was a decade in the making and had many actors looking to move onto something outside of Marvel. One of the amazing things about the whole Avengers storyline is that things seemed to gain steam organically. Of course it was all planned, but it didn’t seem forced. When the TV series kicked off, I just couldn’t keep up. I had a kid who wasn’t old enough to watch them and too many other things to see. I did find the time to complete WandaVision (which I enjoyed) and Falcon & Winter Soldier, which I thought had some interesting ideas, but ultimately fell a bit flat. That being said, I was interested in what they would do with the next phase, even though I had skipped some of the movies by then (I never saw The Eternals, The Marvels, or Ant-Man Quantumania). The problem is, we’re supposedly into phase 5, and nothing cohesive is happening…and more importantly, no one seems to care anymore.
From this point on, there will be spoilers.
Captain America: Brave New World is, for some reason, a direct sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. General Ross has become the President of the United States, and he has asked Sam Wilson to put together the Avengers after Sam retrieves some stolen adamantium. Ross, however, won the presidency with the help of The Leader, who he had been doing experiments on in a blacksite lab. The Leader’s goal is to ruin Thunderbolt Ross’s legacy and to make him mad so he hulks out because The Leader has been feeding him pills laced with gamma energy. If that sounds dumb, that’s because it is.
The script has five different writers credited and that’s the film’s biggest problem, so let’s start there. What I thought we were going to get was a character piece showing how it was going to be tough to be the black Captain America in our America. Let’s be honest - this country is racist as fuck, and that’s already talked about in the MCU, because Isaiah Bradley (the first Super Soldier, also a black man) was treated horribly by the United States government. What I’d love to have seen is a Godfather Part II style story where we see the WWII era Bradley and what he goes through, juxtaposed with the current Sam Wilson Captain America situation. There was an opportunity to make a stand on the current political climate. Unfortunately, there’s nothing brave or new about this film, and while there are a few mentions of “You’re not Steve Rogers”, it’s all superficial. In fact, Anthony Mackie’s Sam is the most boring part of the film. He’s not funny, he’s not charismatic, he’s just a lifeless husk without super powers. At least, they tell you he doesn’t have super powers.
The big thing that Sam wants to hold up is that he has no superpowers. He’s refused the super soldier serum, something he expresses regret over. But you’d never know it anyway, because he has a super suit that basically does whatever he wants it to whenever he wants it to. He’s got a voice activated robot airplane on his back that just knows what he’s thinking. He’s got wings that have insane powers that act via thoughts (apparently), and even when he’s not in the suit, he’s chucking around the Cap shield like it’s a tennis ball, kicking it around fast enough to knock countless enemies out before catching it on the rebound. You’re telling me he didn’t take the super soldier serum? Kicking that shield that hard would destroy the ankle of a normal man. He’s also stabbed in the gut with a small axe and just shrugs it off with plot armor. If you want anyone to identify with Sam Wilson as a ‘normal guy’, then he needs to be a normal guy.
The other huge weakness that other MCU films tend to have is uninteresting villains. There have been some great ones - Thanos, Killmonger, but for the most part the villains suck. The Leader is no different. Tim Blake Nelson is a great character actor, but the way his character is written makes no sense. He wants to ruin Ross’s legacy, which is understandable - the man gained the presidency, using your brain as the guide, and now he’s reneging on his deal. The Leader has the ability to control minds (something that is not explained outside of maybe…he has DNA? Or files on them? It’s not clear and the DNA thing doesn’t make a whole lot of sense anyway since he’s just controlling whoever is convenient for the plot), so what he does is he activates people with a song and then they do his bidding…and that’s really all he does. His intelligence is simply told to us, it’s not earned. In fact, I’d argue that most of the things he does are pretty unintelligent. At the end of the film, he gets captured on purpose to enact his plan, but…I don’t think he really needed to be captured. His final hurrah is to play a recording of Ross over the speakers at a press conference, but why did he need to be captured for that? And how did he do it in the first place? Why wouldn’t he just control Ross and have him say what he wanted him to say? Or control an Avenger? Or control Sam? You can sprinkle in statistics all you want into the dialogue, it’s still not going to convince me someone is smart if they’re only doing dumb things.
And speaking of dialogue, I get that most people in America are pretty stupid, but everything is explained through exposition and it’s not how people talk in real life. There’s a moment where Joaquin hacks into the White House security camera system (which seems like it would be hard to do, but later in the movie they break into a CIA blacksite prison by popping open a keypad basically using a butter knife so it’s probably not that difficult) and he says something like, “Yes, I have hacked into the White House security system.” Everything is spelled out on the screen…except for the end credits scene, which seems like something they wrote and shot after forgetting to shoot one. It says nothing and evokes zero excitement about what’s next.
Speaking of the White House, this is a film that tries to be a political movie, but much like last year’s Civil War, ends up saying nothing. The standing message is to “see the good in people” and that, after an after school special curated speech, those in power will take responsibility for their actions because deep down, they want to do what’s right. It’s an incredibly vanilla, insanely unrealistic, and lacked the balls to go where it could have. Even the military scenarios presented are as inoffensive as it gets, and I don’t see any world in which the United States military causes Japanese casualties and they just don’t respond because “I promise, it was an accident!”
While the writing is the weakest part of this film, everything else is subpar. The chemistry between Anthony Mackie and Danny Ramirez tries to conjure the chemistry Mackie had with Sebastian Stan, but to no avail. It feels forced and corny. In fact, Sebastian Stan has a minute long cameo and it was probably my favorite part of the flick. The filmmaking is surprisingly and noticeably average, with tons of tight shots, so much so that you really doubt anyone was in the same room while filming (which was probably true). And the sets are so unrealistic that nothing feels like it has weight. The final fight (which ends with all the strength of a wet shart) was clearly all just done on a green screen down to the fake trees.
As I understand it, this film went through intensive reshoots, and if this is the end result I can only assume that the first cut was abysmal. It’s a film that is devoid of mystery and excitement. As it stands, this is the weakest Marvel film I’ve seen yet. A brave new world it is not. It plays it safe, does nothing new, and in terms of what comes next for Marvel…I couldn’t care less.
