Captain America: Brave New World, The New Poster Child Of The MCU's Struggles
Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic
Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+ was a good series, but the MCU follow-up Captain America: Brave New World is a perfect encapsulation of everything that has been the Marvel experience since the high-water mark that was Avengers: Endgame. Since then, they have been perpetually spinning their wheels, trying to expand the MCU with several limited series on Disney+ and getting audiences invested in a new generation of superheroes, with uneven results.
Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers passed the Captain America mantle on to Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson at the end of Endgame. Brave New World sees Wilson stepping more fully into the role after struggling with the responsibility in Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Notorious MCU Hulk foil General Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) has become the president and wants Captain America to work for him and restart the Avengers. Sam is reluctant because of the fraught history between them.
Ross wants to convince Sam and others that he is a changed man, but an attempt on his life sees him backslide into his domineering ways and also endangers a multi-national accord he is working on to mine the celestial from Eternals in the Indian Ocean for a valuable new resource stronger than vibranium (one that has… uncanny future implications for the MCU). The attempt on his life sends Ross on a potential path of war while it sends Sam and his military buddy Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), the new Falcon, searching for the person in the shadows pulling the strings.
I’m a fan of Mackie and thought he was a great supporting character in the previous MCU movies Falcon was involved in. Sam is not a super soldier like Steve Rogers was, so he is not indestructible like Steve Rogers. Sam gets by on his intelligence, skill, and some technological boosts (including a suit upgrade courtesy of the Wakandans). In the press junkets, Mackie and others have said that Sam’s superpower is his heart, which comes through in different ways.
The character was initially introduced as someone who counseled returning soldiers; his empathy for other characters comes through in a lot of moments, maybe no more so than for the character of Isaiah Bradley, a former super-soldier of the Korean War who was jailed and experimented on for decades by the government. When Isaiah gets unwittingly pulled into the conspiracy plot against Ross, Sam is as focused on and invested in clearing Bradley’s name as he is in finding the man behind it all.
That all ties into another aspect of the film that I thought it handled well, which was the fact that Captain America, a symbol of American greatness, hope, and inspiration, was now a Black man, representing a community that the ideals that Captain America stands for had been denied for so long. The film doesn’t hammer the audience with this stuff, but it’s woven into the fabric. Isaiah Bradley, a Black man locked up for decades, had a very different super soldier experience than that of Steve Rogers. Sam has some dialogue at one point about the weight of carrying the shield, how he’s doing it for more than just himself, and how his actions are judged differently.
Because of Mackie’s stepping up to take the lead role of Captain America, it would have been nice if they’d had a better script and storyline for this movie. Unfortunately, Mackie’s strong performance stands out as one of the few bright spots of this movie.
It’s impossible to talk about a new MCU movie at this point and not talk about how it fits into not just the broader MCU storyline but also the story of Marvel in its post-Endgame phase. To say that Marvel is spinning its wheels is an understatement. This movie is very emblematic of that.
While I like Mackie in the MCU, one of the struggles of the MCU has been in trying to elevate the characters who were previously role players into starring spots, kind of like in sports when a team’s best player retires, and they search for the next star to fill the void. You never want to be the next quarterback in football after a Hall of Fame quarterback retires. But this is the inherent difficulty that Marvel faces: actors age and can’t keep playing the same characters for thirty years. Sometimes, the actors want to move on and find new challenges. Marvel must develop a new crop of superheroes that will just be big shoes to fill.
What hampers Brave New World more than anything is that the movie struggles to feel big and cinematic enough. There is a scene out in the Indian Ocean at the remains of the Celestial from Eternals. That is one of those moments where an audience should feel the scale with the massive protrusion from the ocean jutting out into the sky, but it never quite captures it. There is no sense of awe at it. Instead, it feels like a missed opportunity.
Also, a missed opportunity is the villains. Giancarlo Esposito shows up early as Sidewinder but only gets three scenes, and one of them is exposition-heavy, likely intended to hint that the character will be in a future installment of Captain America in some form or other. While I like the actor, the person pulling the strings was a call back to an earlier Marvel movie, which makes sense given that Ross is a central character here, but overall, I was not impressed with the mastermind puppet.
It’s no secret that Ford’s Ross becomes Red Hulk, as it was all over the promotional material. Ford is a nice addition, filling in for the deceased William Hurt in the role of Thaddeus Ross. His motivations for trying to show he is a changed man are because of his strained relationship with his daughter. Becoming the Red Hulk could have been something unique, but when they used the character as an opportunity to destroy half the White House, it just felt like the type of disaster porn you’d see from Roland Emmerich.
Some political elements fell utterly flat for me. Ross is a polarizing figure and a controversial president because of his past and his divisive actions. Sam is reluctant to work with him, and so are others. While the sentiment of bridging divides to work together is nice, this comes across as neutered, and it felt like there were some rewrites to tame it down, given that this movie would be coming out right after a hotly contested US election. It felt weirdly obligatory but thoroughly lukewarm, like they didn’t want to offend anyone.
To me, some of the best standalone Marvel movies have been the ones that have a distinct genre feel to them, like how Captain America: The Winter Soldier was a nod to 70s political thrillers. Captain America: Brave New World doesn’t know what kind of movie it wants to be. There is the distinct sense that director Julius Onah and crew are serving too many Marvel masters here, pulled in too many directions. It feels more like an extension of the Disney+ limited series Falcon and the Winter Soldier than a sequel in the Captain America movie franchise or a chapter in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (emphasis on cinematic). Anthony Mackie deserved better.
Rating: 2.5 out of stars