Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson/Captain America in Captain America: Brave New World.Eli Adé/Marvel Studios
- Captain America: Brave New World
- Directed by Julius Onah
- Written by Rob Edwards, Malcolm Spellman, Dalan Musson, Peter Glanz and Julius Onah
- Starring Anthony Mackie, Harrison Ford and Giancarlo Esposito
- Classification PG; 118 minutes
- Opens in theatres Feb. 14
Someone needs to slap a tariff on the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Now 35 movies and a dozen television series deep, the MCU has teetered and tottered in global influence ever since the Avengers united the nations with 2019′s Endgame, the high point of Disney’s grand world-conquering campaign. For every success story like last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine (which made big bank but also felt utterly disposable) there have been head-slapping quagmires that failed to please even the most forgiving Marvel patriots (Thor: Love and Thunder, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, The Marvels).
But now, with the politically incoherent, creatively inert and just plain insulting sequel Captain America: Brave New World, the MCU brain trust led by uber-producer Kevin Feige has truly flatlined. It is not just that this new movie redraws the border between bad and good – it’s that its territorial ineptitude wipes its cinematic empire off the map completely, obliterating years of hard-won soft power.
The utter failure of Brave New World starts and stop with its storytelling – and trying to dissect what exactly goes wrong and where is an essential, maddening part of the problem. To even attempt to understand this film, you need to have intimate knowledge of several long-forgotten MCU projects, many of which weren’t that well-liked to begin with.
Do you recall, for starters, the 2008 flick The Incredible Hulk? Not the one with Eric Bana. And not any of the many other, more recent Marvel outings featuring Mark Ruffalo as Dr. Bruce Banner. No, this movie starred Edward Norton as the gamma-ray-infected hero, alongside William Hurt as his military nemesis, General Ross, and Liv Tyler as Ross’s daughter/Banner’s love interest, Betty.
Okay, so stick with me: to decipher Brave New World’s plot – which follows sorta-superhero Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) as he tries to uncover a deadly conspiracy inside the U.S. government, which culminates in a battle with a differently hued Hulk than we’re used to – you need to be intimately familiar with that 17-year-old Norton-led Marvel misfire. But not so much that you would be confused as to why Ross is now played by Harrison Ford. And don’t worry about where Ruffalo (or Norton, for that matter) might be, either. Just, well, um. Listen, you’ve surely retained fond memories of Tim Blake Nelson, who played the Hulk’s secondary bad guy Samuel Sterns, right? Who? What? Huh?
Okay, you know what, let’s start fresh. Does the 2021 Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier ring a bell? C’mon, it was the one in which Wilson takes up the Captain America mantle after his buddy Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) retires? And he has to make nice with the robotic-armed supersoldier Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) along the way? Yeah, okay, I don’t blame anyone for memory-holing this one, either.
Not even the typically puckish charms of Mackie or the grizzled growl of Harrison Ford can save the film from feeling so unappetizing.Eli Adé/Marvel Studios
Last chance: how about the 2021 movie Eternals? Whose climax involved the corpse of a giant celestial demigod emerging from the Earth’s core? I am not making this up! Anyway, you should know that that big cosmic dude’s name was Tiamut, and he plays a crucial role in Brave New World, too.
Maybe – a Tiamut-sized maybe! – the syllabus-required narrative of Brave New World could be forgiven if the filmmaking was base-level competent. But director Julius Onah (The Cloverfield Paradox) displays absolutely no sense of style, sticking with staid single-cut/two-shot/single-cut scenes that will convince the most visually uninspired among us that perhaps we, too, might have what it takes to direct a movie. And somehow, Onah’s many scenes in which characters rattle off backstory and exposition are more aesthetically engaging than the film’s action sequences, which are embarrassingly sloppy.
The stunning failure of Onah’s set pieces – from a toothless shootout inside the White House to a preposterously boring naval dogfight high above the Indian Ocean – are especially egregious when compared with previous Captain America movies. Any single moment from, say, 2014′s The Winter Soldier – like the intense Nick Fury ambush on the streets of Washington or the brutal fight between Steve Rogers and a small army of henchmen inside a tiny elevator – so thoroughly crushes the entirety of Brave New World that it is genuinely sad. Not even the typically puckish charms of Mackie or the grizzled growl of Ford can save the film from feeling so unappetizing. Imagine having steak one night, a gas-station hot dog the next. And then, on your way out of that gas station, you wretch the wiener right back up.
Perhaps this all sounds unfair, almost gastronomically cruel. But then Brave New World’s shamefully neutered politics regurgitate right themselves back up along with that roadside frankfurter, and I am left with no choice but to dig this film’s grave even deeper.
To go by the Marvel marketing machine, Brave New World is meant to empower and inspire. A movie in which a Black hero picks up the shield of a country whose back was built on slavery, released in the midst of Black History Month? That has to count for something. And its narrative ostensibly follows up on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’s main thread that paralleled the hideous “Tuskegee Syphilis Studies” of the 1930s, in which the U.S. government experimented on Black men without their knowledge or consent. The series’ exploration into this damning chapter of American history – which involved Sam encountering a one-time Black supersoldier whom the military treated as a guinea pig – wasn’t exactly revelatory or deep. But it was thematically compelling and historically enlightening, offering substance amongst the spectacle.
Yet Brave New World’s screenplay – credited to almost as many writers as there are syllables in the film’s title – is woefully confused as to whether fascism is bad or, hey, maybe there are just some very fine people on both sides? The janky story – which at one point features a U.S. president whose complexion becomes a literal state of red – consistently comes just up against the edge of an interesting theme before lazily embracing the coward’s way out. This is a movie of pussyfooting and sidestepping, unconcerned with race, history, heroism or really any idea at all beyond “Hulk smash.”
It might be a brave new world out there, but America might want to fix the MCU, its biggest cultural export, before adding any more states to its roster.
