"Captain America: Brave New World" review — Please, please, please, just make it stop already
“You may be Captain America, but you’re not Steve Rogers.”
Do you remember Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk from seventeen years ago? Do you remember Chloé Zhao’s empty, dreary Eternals from 2021 that got immediately upstaged by Marvel’s second-biggest hit ever a month later? Did you happen to catch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+ when the service first came out after COVID? Well, Marvel Studios is really banking on the fact that you care about, let alone watched, two of its least commercially and critically successful films and one of its early streaming miniseries for you to even begin to invest in, or even follow, its latest convoluted and misguided poor excuse for a movie. Don’t let the “Captain America” in the title fool you: Julius Onah’s excruciating Brave New World is a far cry from the heart-filled, Chris Evens-led films of the 2020s. What was once one of the most reliable sub-brands of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s arsenal of interconnected superhero stories is now relegated to bottom-tier, ugly slop. With poorly constructed characters, dismal action direction, and a sense of visual style on par with that of a lousy CW show, there is almost nothing going for this dreary entry in a tired, worn-out franchise.
Stuck in the vague, murky present of the MCU’s rocky post-Avengers: Endgame reality, where it seems like all Marvel films have been since 2019, Captain America: Brave New World picks up sometime after the events of Eternals, in which the emergence of a giant alien robot from the Indian Ocean as led to a major international incident between India, France, Japan, and the United States of America. Leading the American charge is the newly-elected POTUS, the spitfire military general Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (a role originated by the late William Hurt and now played by Harrison Ford). After a major personality adjustment and the loss of his iconic mustache, Ross has taken a turn for the political. Meanwhile, Sam Wilson has taken on the Captain America moniker and works in conjunction with the U.S. Marines to perform some incredibly dangerous missions. For those paying attention to the MCU, you might remember that Ross and Wilson were on opposing sides of the Sokovia Accords in Captain America: Civil War (2016) and the tensions between the two men still run deep. The Ross-Wilson dynamic is what the film centres around and Ross’ deeply held skeletons might just be the piece to a war between the two men.
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| Photo via Marvel Studios. |
The film kicks off with Wilson leading a covert mission to retrieve a stolen U.S. piece of tech, which of course is reminiscent of the opening of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), which involved Steve Rogers leading a similar mission and also included a sudden leap from a military airplane. The inevitable comparison between the two, however, is unfortunately a negative one. From its first action sequence, the writing is already on the wall for Brave New World: the editing is far too quick, the cinematography is poorly framed and poorly lit, the CG effects stick out like a sore thumb, and the performances are poor imitations of the Platonic ideal of quippy MCU protagonists. Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson get away with their quips because their Evans and Johansson. Anthony Mackie and co-lead Danny Ramirez are a far cry from the series’ previous leads. “You’re not Steve Rogers,” snarks Ross at one point to Wilson in one of their heated exchanges. In the film, it’s a line that’s supposed to cut at Wilson, although this hardly contributes to what few character beats he has and just imitates the journey he already went through on TV. For the viewer, however, the comment just makes one miss the Chris Evans of it all. Yeah, Sam Wilson, you are no Steve Rogers, and the film is worse for it.
It might seem unfair to rag on Mackie’s Cap for being the new guy. After all, at one point, all of the most iconic Avengers have been the new-guy-on-the-block at one point or another. The only problem here is that Brave New World is fundamentally incapable of making the case for why Sam Wilson is worth rooting for. Sure, he’s been an MCU staple for the last eleven years (this is Mackie’s seventh appearance in a Marvel movie, in addition to the Falcon/Winter Soldier show), but he’s always been playing second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) fiddle to the other Avengers. If this is Wilson’s test as a bonafide MCU lead, then it’s a test failed. He is a character who lacks a real personality, drive, conviction, or meaningful, realized relationship with anyone in this story. Mackie’s performance is not enough to push him beyond a sidekick. The character writing also does nothing for him. Wilson is without personal stakes in this story. What does he want? What is his goal? What is at stake for him? To be the new Captain America? Didn’t we already do that story? The previous Captain America adventures work so well because Steve Rogers has so much on the line each and every time: he has personal, social, and ideological stakes in every story beat. But what does Sam Wilson get here? Wilson is a nothing character in a film full of nothing characters. He simply reacts to the plot and is never an agent of narrative development.
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| Photo via Marvel Studios. |
This failure to adequately create a central protagonist who is worth investing in speaks volumes to the complete lack of creative competency shown here. Onah and his menagerie of hack writers and studio-mandated reshoots have created a film devoid of character, heart, or passion. Brave New World’s appearance on-screen reeks of its mismanaged production process. It looks hideous, the reshoots are more than apparent, the stakes never feel real, and the characters fall flat, meaning that the film loses any emotional impact it could have. The film can’t even get its big action spectacle right. There’s no well-executed, enticing action sequence in the entire two-hour affair. From the opening military operation, to a second-act international stand-off, to the finale battle between Sam Wilson and Ross’ Hulked-out make-over, no amount of creativity, or even possibility, can be seen. Onah displays complete incompetence as an action filmmaker, which should come as no surprise given his only other directing credit of note is the dismal Netflix Original, The Cloverfield Paradox (2018). Even when they are at their worst, most MCU movies can deliver some sort of mindless, loud fun, even if they are missing anything else remotely compelling. But Onah can’t even get the dumb fun right.
The cast, while not terrible performers by any means, is underutilized. MCU newbie Harrison Ford, who plays President Ross, is doing all he can to keep the movie afloat. Ross is at least given some semblance of a character arc, with his relationship to his off-screen daughter Betty (played in voice by Liv Tyler, who reprises her role from The Incredible Hulk). Ford brings a minimal sense of gravitas and reality to the part, which seems absent from the other performances here. Despite how much the appearance of “Red Hulk” was amped up in the marketing, Ross’ alter-ego hardly makes a dent. He appears briefly as a third-act punch-up with Captain America but is nothing more than that. The tragedy that could be found in Ross’ character is not present, which means that Ford’s talents are wasted. It’s a poor pay-off to a character that has been bouncing around the sidelines of the MCU since 2008. The narrative villain here is Tim Blake Nelson’s Samuel Stern, AKA The Leader, yet another side character from Leterrier’s Hulk flick who finally gets his due. Nelson’s role here is to be the “mastermind behind the scenes,” who uses advanced mind control to orchestrate a plot to get revenge against Ross for the events of The Incredible Hulk (we cannot escape it!). Nelson does a serviceable job, but knowing how much the actor is capable of, one cannot help but feel a little let down by how little he has to work with.
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| Photo via Marvel Studios. |
Going into the film’s second and third acts, Stern’s army of mind-controlled soldiers makes things difficult for Wilson and co., who are now trying to stop a four-way international war while also investigating what secret plan Stern has for Ross. Captain America receives support from Danny Ramirez’s Joaquin Torres, the new Falcon, and Shira Haas’ Ruth Bat-Seraph, an Israeli ex-Widow and personal security guard for the president. Ramirez is perfectly serviceable, even if the character totally lacks a unique personality. Haas’ character is a riff on the comic book superhero “Sabra,” a Mossad agent and a mutant who has played a supporting role in occasional Hulk, X-Men, and Excalibur adventures, and not much else. However, after significant pushback to the inclusion of a Mossad agent in the film, the character was totally reworked in reshoots, leading to her being a boring, presence in the story. Carl Lumbly’s Isaiah Bradley helps round out the cast, another leftover from the TV series. In the world of the MCU, Bradley was the product of a 1950s U.S. experiment to create a new Captain America during the Korean War, which led to decades of abuse and torture at the hands of the government. The television series explores, in part, the interesting political and social tension which exists between the two Black men who have taken on the Captain America role: one who was the victim of racialized violence and the other who became a national symbol. But when Bradley sits behind prison bars for most of the runtime, he can neither be explored in any meaningful way nor have any agency in the story.
To sit through Captain America: Brave New World is a tortuous affair. There is no compelling story being told here, no characters worth caring about and no sense of heroism and excitement that kept the previous Captain America adventures going. Onah fails to create an action film with a personality, excitement, or any real sense of adventure. Instead of focusing on Sam Wilson, discovering what makes him tick, what makes him unique, what he cares about, and how this, allegedly, “brave new world” will push him to his limits, we have a film in which Wilson plays a supporting role to patching up seventeen-year-old Hulk plotlines. It is a complete mess. The film, further, is an indictment of the current haphazard state of the franchise as a whole. We are just about at the end of the fifth content phase of the MCU, which wraps up this May with Thunderbolts*, although I doubt anyone could tell that anything had changed from Phase Four. Brave New World makes me worried for the future of this franchise. The next Avengers outing, Avengers: Doomsday, is out next May. And, frankly, I couldn’t be less excited. The Marvel content machine is struggling to make audiences care about its new characters or just simply provide a story worth investing in. If Sam Wilson is to be the next leader of the Avengers, as Ross asks him to do at one point during the film, then I don’t believe there is a franchise worth caring about. I’m tired.
Captain America: Brave New World is now playing in theatres.
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