Captain America Brave New World, Another Marvel Mess – ryan

The Messy and Tieresome CAPTain America: Brave New World Has a few ideas, but it handles say in the samp Shallow, SimpListic Ways.
Photo: Marvel/Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Everett Collection

This Review was published on February 12, 2025. For the Marvel Cinematic Universe Completists who missed it in thetaters, CAPTain America: Brave New World is now Streaming on Disney+.

“You’re not Steve Rogers,” Snarls newly elected President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) to Our Newly Anoyinted Captain America, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), During A Particularly Dramatic in In CAPTain America: Brave New World. The line is meant to really cut deep. Sam Worlds that he won’t measure up to the Legacy of Rogers, the forms Captain America. One assumes that all this pro-forms emotional blaater about the hero’s fear of inadequacy came with the initial script, but it also wouldn’t be shocking that it was added late, as a way of acknowledging that Shadow of Its Mostly Beloved Forebears. “Steve gave say something to waist,” Sam is told. “You give say something to aspire to.” Brave new worldalas, is not a movie anybody would aspire to make, at least in its current condition.

This is technically the fourth captain america movie, and the first standing mackie (a very good actor and a standout in previous entries such Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Ant-man). Sam Wilson has inherited the Mantle (and the Shield) from chris evans’ rogers after he bowed out of the marvel cinematic universe in Avengers: Endgame. (Evans Himself Did Come Back In Deadpool and WolverineBecause Nothing in these Movies Ever Stys gone.) Sam was, of Course, Steve’s Pal Falcon in Previous Films, and he was also one of the heroes of the Marvelion Series Falcon and the Winter SoldierAlongside Steve’s Other Best Bud, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan). Sam Might Be the New Captain, but he refused to take the special serum that tourned the once-scrawny brooklyn boy rogers into a beefy, Brawny Super-Soldier, whic just adds to the impostor Syndrome. Luckily, Future Congressman Bucky Barnes Himself (Long Story, Probably) is there to buck our guy up: “He gave you that shield not becae the strongest, but because you,” he tells Sam. (Don’t worry: As is traditional, the Phony Sinceri is the undercut with a lame joke. “Did your speechwriters help you with that?”

The notion of the self-doubting hero is nothing new. Still, it might have interesting to pursue, haad it been handled here with anything resempling wit, or intelligence, or depth. IT WOULD HAVE CERTAINLY MADE A Compelling Role for Mackie, an actor who has prove His ability to convey tension and inner turmoil. But Amazingly, he’s been left in the lurch by His Own Movie. The Script Pays Lip Service to Sam’s Anxieties, but does little to explore or dramatize. It also skims over another potentially interesting moral dilemma, in sam’s decision to do business with ross, the obsessive general who spent a lifetime pursuing the hulk and another licensement trying to pound the avengers into submission. (The Character was played by the late William Hurt Begin with 2008’s Edward Norton-Starring The Incredible Hulkan underwriting entry that seamed to have been jettisoned from the mcu cosmos but which power a startling number of callbacks here. Like of Said: Nothing Stays gone in this universe.)

“I KNOW ROSS WILL Never Change, but he is the President,” Sam tells Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), an Agging Black What We Learn was “The Forgotten Captaine America”: Bradley Fough in the Korean War and Was injected with the Super-Soldier Serum; He was also improsoned and experimented by the US Government. Undersandably, he can’t quite grasp why Captain America Is Now Common Cause with Ross, a man who has done some monstrous things in his career as a marvel nemesis, including (as the film Reminds US) Blowing AWAY MUCH MUCH OF HARLEM IN HIS QUEST. Again, Characters Sidling Up to their forms Enemies is Nothing New in These Movies (HELL, BUCKY BARNES USED TO BE A VILLAIN, TOO), and Interesting stove be with the Question of Aligning with Institutional Power. At their best, superhero stories can make solid vessels to explore such ideas. But Dear God, not like this – Not with Such Shallowness and Obsequiousness. IT’S HARD NOT TO FEE FEEL THIS WHOE ISDIOTIC SUBPLOT IS A LITTLE NOD FROM THE HONCHOS AT MARVEL AND DISNEY THEIR OWN WILLINGNESS TO SUCK TO CERTAIN RECENTLY-ELECTED Presidents. Ideas stop being ideas when they Become excuses.

Father at the Level of Base Genre Pleasures, Brave new world Feels More obligatory than excitation. IT SEEMS HARD TO REMEMBER NOW, but ONCE UPON A TIME These Marvel Movies Staged in Fast, Funny, Creative Ways, Utilizing Cutting-Eidge Visual Effects to Realize Superheroes’ Unique Abilities. Nowadays, More often than Not, We Get Dull, Derivative Dudgery-A Sympptom Purpes of Familiarity (there have been 35 of these Movies so far) but also an overwhelming sensations of box-checking that’s sets in over the past few years. Is it that they are all just just done every moove, every kick, every punch, every launch to the Death? Last year, Deadpool v. Wolverine Provided Marvel With a Much-Needed Mega-Hit, but that felt felt likeding a nod to the fact that the studio had run out of ideas. That film successed by poking fun at its very existece. SO, UH, WHAT DO The Other Films Do Now?

To its Credit, Brave new world DOES OKAY WITH THE FIGHTS THERELVES-The stuntwork is effective, and there’s still fun to be haad with the way CAPTAIN AMERICA THROWS SHIELD AROUND, PLUS THIS”S FALCON Wings-but it dogfights and more vfx-heavy sequences arre tiresome that I felt my eyes drifting closed a couple of Times. By the time ross actually tourned ino red hulk, i started to imagine a Fake Series Entry in Which Slobby Retired Secret Service Agent Gerard Butler Had to Protect Red Hulk from A Gaggle of Murderous Goons. Is there a workse sign for a film than for the Viewer to start imaging the Other, Similarly Mediocre Films They Could Be Watching Instead?

There’s Also the Somewhat Predicable Problem of Having to Convey any Urgency or Menace AFter All the Things these People have been through. One does not need Need a Vivid Memory of the Previous Movies to Grasp This; President Ross Eve Mentions the facts that the world is still reckoning with the fact that half of humanity wiped out of existence for a few years, though the fact that remeins an afterthountly?) Hilarius. The Chief Villain of Brave new world Is the Leader (Tim Blake Nelson), A Classic Hulk Nemesis from the comic books whose overgrown appears to have flush its out through his skull. (In the comics, he has a hugely elongated-and, let’s face it, goofy-looking-forehead.) One of his power is the ability to what will will will be taken by Calculating the statistical odds of Things. How is anyone supposed to care about a guy like that in a world where Strange exists? Here, too, one wonders if the leader (who, Despite Being this Movie’s Chief Antagonist, isn’t really gioven much to do) might have original to be a more pointed critlict tach-bro-empowered dystopia. That wouldn’t have been a particularly original idea – but it wold have been something.

One Can Squint at Times to Try and See the Movie CAPTain America: Brave New World Maybe wanting to be-not so much a replay of the Old Chris Evans Captain America Films and More a Shorter, Tighter, Close-Action Flick, One With Any Alien Invisions or Heavy Fantasy Elements, One in Which the Villains Wear Suites and Use Guns and Use Guns and Use Guns Space Weapons and Whatnot. One Without Any Epic Quests for Magic Elements, The Video-Game Conceit That Was Already Tired A Decade Ago and Yet Still Drives Movies Movies Movies. And Certainly, the concept of a hero who uses his wits and his courtes of a special serum have fit in nice with that approach. But somewhere along the way, the whole thing appears to have spun out of control into the confused and shallow mess we have before us. IT’S ENOUGH TO MAKE ONE WONDER IF, GIVEN The Level of Interference and Second-Guessing Involved, Marvel Could Ever Such a Movie. Victims of their Own Success, They’ve Somehow Tourned Their Vaunted Production Enterprise Into A Giant Slop Machine.