Captain America: Brave New World can’t hide a Hulk behind Sam Wilson

Captain America: Brave New World was never going to escape “being political” in some aspect. You can’t make a story about Captain America without reckoning with what it means for a single man to represent a nation. At the same time, you can’t make a story about Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson and not reckon with the visual of a Black man in the colors of the American flag, asked to play the role of a bombastic American tradition.

Nevertheless, director Julius Onah (The Cloverfield Paradox) and a cadre of five screenwriters (including The Falcon and the Winter Soldier creator-producer Malcolm Spellman) did their best to silo Brave New World away from political statement, and focus this new Marvel Cinematic Universe movie on human characters acting in service of deeply personal goals. The thing is, they also made it a movie where Captain America gets in a fist fight with a large red rage-monster who just happens to be the sitting president of the United States.

Onah and crew can’t obscure the politics of the American executive behind personal stakes any more than you could hide a Hulk behind Sam Wilson. But more critically, when they try to dodge the political commentary that’s always marked the MCU’s Captain America movies, and focus on personal stakes instead, those plotlines simply don’t land with any force or focus.

Brave New World is a close sequel to the Disney Plus miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and a more distant sequel to 2008’s little-loved MCU movie The Incredible Hulk. Mackie’s Sam takes the fore as Captain America, along with a set of characters introduced in TFatWS: Sam’s buddy and mentee, the up-and-coming new Falcon Joaqin Torres (played by Top Gun: Maverick’s Danny Ramirez), and Isaiah Bradley (Alias’ Carl Lumbly), an experimental recipient of Steve Rogers’ super-soldier serum who served three decades of jail time for his Korean War sacrifices.

Harrison Ford (Jeep’s 2025 Super Bowl spot) portrays Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, stepping in for the late William Hurt, who first played the role in Incredible Hulk. In that movie, Ross was the father of Bruce Banner’s girlfriend Betty Ross (Ad Astra’s Liv Tyler) and the military leader under whose watch the Hulk and the Abomination (last seen in a comedic She-Hulk turn) sacked the neighborhood of Harlem.

In Brave New World, Ross has moved past the infamy of Incredible Hulk, shined up his anti-superhuman crusader image (see Captain America: Civil War, 2016) and gotten himself elected to the U.S. presidency on a platform of “togetherness.” He’s dead set on one goal for his fabled first hundred days: to secure an international treaty peacefully dividing the spoils of the Celestial corpse that partially erupted out of the Indian Ocean in Eternals (2021). All of that is thrown for a loop when disaster strikes at a White House gala where Sam, Joaquin, and Isaiah are honored guests. From there, Sam and Joaquin put themselves on the case of figuring out who interrupted Ross’ gala and to what ends, whether or not Ross sanctions the search.

Much of this exposition is delivered via news anchor clips in the first few minutes of the film, and it’s breathtaking to watch Marvel Cinematic Universe movies reach the point where they need an overcaffeinated tapdancer’s cadence of “As seen in That Other Comic You’re Not Reading #352! — Your Mighty Marvel Editor” narration boxes, just like their inspirations.

To the annoyance of any fan looking for that most elusive of MCU Easter eggs — consistent characterization from project to project — Sam’s personal development in Brave New World is essentially reheated leftovers of questions asked and answered in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. In Brave New World, Sam goes right back to asking himself, “Did Steve Rogers make the right call in nominating me as his successor?” and “Should I have taken the super soldier serum to gain super powers?” even though TFatWS already had him confidently pick up Steve’s shield and observe the serum-assisted fall of a man who gained some of Steve’s powers, but showed none of his integrity.

Brave New World dives deep into the motivation of Thaddeus Ross. But in attempting to mold him into a sympathetic figure, the filmmakers seem blind to the ways his human failings are amplified by the power inherent in being a world leader, or rendered unsympathetic by the actions he took to get there. Again, if Brave New World offered something toothy in Sam and Thaddeus’ interiority, that still wouldn’t distract from BNW’s take on not just presidential power, but a superpowered president. But that would at least be something else to focus on.

There are standout moments in Brave New World: Tim Blake Nelson provides a few of them as Samuel Sterns, whose gamma-irradiated transformation into the Hulk villain known as the Leader was a thread established in The Incredible Hulk, but heretofore unreturned to. He turns in a classic “character actor as supervillain” performance, which is to say: one that’s fun to watch. An action sequence of Sam and Joaquin going at it in their wing-suits against flying enemies is also great spectacle, delivering all the kinetics of an Iron Man battle, but retaining a thrilling humanity from their more emotionally expressive and physically vulnerable character designs.

But as a Captain America movie, Brave New World is batting strongly below average. Its plot is at least mildly reminiscent of 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but it’s both fair and unfair to compare the two. Unfair in that Winter Soldier is still among the best-regarded MCU movies, while BNW is running uphill from table-setting a potential new Captain America franchise, dealing with post-production rewrites and reshoots, and the general malaise of the MCU’s post-Avengers: Endgame audience. But fair in that, like Winter Soldier, BNW was also clearly designed as a grounded thriller (by the sliding scale of “grounded” in the MCU) featuring global political stakes and a superpowered conspiracy at its heart.

What maybe jumps out the most in this comparison is how careful the writers and directors behind the MCU’s previous Captain America movies were to distance themselves from any real interaction with a modern definition of America. First Avenger kept Steve Rogers in World War II, Winter Soldier kept him in a world of super-espionage and secret Nazi societies, and Civil War launched him to globetrotting international fugitive status. One of the biggest hurdles the Brave New World team puts in the way of their own attempt to depoliticize Captain America is Sam Wilson’s willingness to work with actual, un-fictionalized U.S. military forces and intelligence.

The MCU’s Steve Rogers has always been carefully defined as apart from his military and espionage brethren — defying WWII orders, standing against SHIELD’s expansion even before it was revealed to be compromised by Hydra, and going rogue at the first sign that he might be forced to take orders from an international bureaucracy rather than his own sense of integrity. Between The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Brave New World, Sam spends his tenure as Captain America wrestling with whether he’s living up to Steve’s legacy, but never with the fact that the most consistent throughline of the MCU’s Steve Rogers was trying to find meaning in his life other than fighting someone else’s war.

Look: There is no such thing as non-political art. This is especially true for superheroes, a genre in which every issue is a new and thrilling exercise in defining what makes a “hero” and what makes a “villain,” while putting both in unmistakable, brightly colored costumes. Captain America comics have always (always, always) wrestled with the idea of America in one way or another, for better and for worse. There’s a word for a Cap story that refuses that call: Boring.

Captain America: Brave New World hits theaters on Feb. 14.