With its first few Captain America films, Marvel Studios sold audiences on the idea that its superhero movies could be more than live-action cartoons. By borrowing from other genres, they could become gritty, character-focused thrillers like The Winter Soldier or splashy crossover events like Civil War. And the tonal shifts between each feature made it feel like the first Avenger was evolving in tandem with the larger MCU’s ongoing story.
That evolution came to a climax with Avengers: Endgame, which sent Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers off into the sunset to stunning box-office effect. The movie also set the stage for Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson to take up the Captain America mantle like in Marvel’s comics. But narratively, it left the MCU in an awkward, Avengers-less state that Marvel has struggled to pull the franchise out of.
Marvel clearly wants director Julius Onah’s Captain America: Brave New World to be a palate cleanser — one that remembers and builds on the events of Marvel’s other recent features. The film does a serviceable job of establishing a new status quo, but it struggles to articulate how this Captain America is different from his predecessor. And while Brave New World’s worldbuilding seems promising at first, it all falls flat under the weight of its exceedingly muddled political messaging and rehashed plot points.
Set some time after Disney Plus’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Brave New World revolves around Wilson (Mackie) as he sets out to remind everyone why he’s the one carrying a vibranium shield. Sam knows that no matter how many lives he saves, there are always going to be people who see him as a pale imitation of Rogers with no real superpowers. But with the Avengers still disbanded and cunning supervillains like Seth Voelker / Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) running wild all over the world, Sam can’t help but feel that he has a personal responsibility to maintain peace as best he can.
That mentality is part of why Air Force lieutenant Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) is so insistent on strapping on his own pair of jet-powered wings and joining Sam in the field as the new Falcon. And the winged duo’s ability to diffuse dangerous situations while also making the US military / government look good by association is what makes them valuable assets in the eyes of former Army general / newly elected President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford).
With the world’s superpowers poised to sign a treaty meant to ensure they all have equal access to the planet’s adamantium — a newly discovered element mined from the corpse of Eternals’ dead Celestial — Ross needs all the good publicity he can get. Sam is happy to oblige, but when Ross approaches him after an unusually easy mission with a proposal to restart the Avengers Initiative, the former soldier can’t help but wonder whether his president might have ulterior motives.
The opening act’s busyness feels like the direct result of Marvel trying to squeeze in enough exposition for this story to make sense to folks who haven’t been keeping up with the MCU. The movie needs you to understand that, no, Sam doesn’t have supersoldier serum flowing through his veins, and yes, Ford’s Ross is the same person who beefed with Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. Those points are important, but Brave New World’s script goes so hard on belaboring them that it feels like co-writers Onah, Malcolm Spellman, Rob Edwards, Dalan Musson, and Peter Glanz don’t quite trust you to be able to follow along as the film starts teasing its relatively more intriguing beats.
Though a few of Brave New World’s scenes focused specifically on the racism Sam experiences as the first official Black Captain America are especially compelling, the movie comes alive as it brings supersoldier / Korean War veteran Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) into the picture. It’s in quiet scenes between Isaiah and Sam, two Black men who have firsthand experience being wrongfully imprisoned by a political system they dedicated their lives to, that Brave New World really starts to illustrate the thorniness of being a superhero who does double duty as a state-sponsored mascot.
Mackie and Lumbly are excellent together, and they sell Sam and Isaiah as unlikely friends bonded by their ability to be vulnerable with one another. Their chemistry is one of the bigger reasons why Brave New World’s first major twist — Isaiah pulling a gun on Ross during a gathering at the White House — lands so well in spite of its predictability. But the altercation also splits them up and sends Mackie off to carry a story that, aside from a few inspired action set pieces, feels entirely too familiar for its own good.
Because Brave New World is another Marvel-branded political thriller, the similarities it shares with The Winter Soldier make sense up to a certain point. As the film introduces elements of brainwashing and doubles down on the idea that the American government is capable of large-scale villainy, however, it feels increasingly like Marvel was not especially concerned with giving Sam his own unique Captain America story. There’s even another long-forgotten villain who, similar to Toby Jones’ Arnim Zola, returns in a slightly different form after years of being locked away in secret.
And, in what feels like a ham-fisted attempt at recreating the MCU’s original Captain America / Black Widow / Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) dynamic, the film spends an inordinate amount of time trying to build up Ross’ Red Room-trained confidante Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas) as a new hero and foil to Sam.
Especially in scenes focused on Ruth, you get the sense that Brave New World’s story underwent drastic changes during production — seemingly in response to the backlash Marvel received after announcing that Haas had been cast as the mutant Mossad agent Sabra. Technically speaking, Ruth and Sabra are the same character, which the movie alludes to by mentioning her old life in Israel. But her subplots have been so thoroughly whittled down that she tends to feel out of place and like a detail Brave New World easily could have done without.
Though Ford gets far more to do than Haas, the messages baked into Ross are similarly awkward. In turns, he’s an imperialist warmonger, an ineffectual old man, and a girl dad wounded by his daughter Betty’s (Liv Tyler) refusal to speak to him. He also happens to be a new kind of Hulk who doesn’t know how to control his powers, which the movie seems to think is a clever way of saying something novel about the last eight years of US politics.
Onah flexes an impressive eye for action in Brave New World’s flashy set pieces that each feel uniquely designed to showcase Sam’s new aerial tricks. But those kinetic moments of spectacle aren’t enough to make the movie feel like it has anything substantive to say about who Sam is or how his becoming Captain America changes the world. It’s a shame because Mackie seems ready to headline the franchise as the MCU hurtles into a next phase. But Brave New World does him few favors aside from teasing that he’ll be back on the big screen at some point in the near future.
Captain America: Brave New World also stars Xosha Roquemore, Tim Blake Nelson, and Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson. The movie hits theaters on February 14th.
