When Chris Evans left the role of Steve Rogers in Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel Cinematic Universe turned to his colleague Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon (Anthony Mackie), to take up the mantle of Captain America, first in the streaming series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and now in the MCU’s 35th (!) motion picture, Captain America: Brave New World. In so doing, the film has implicitly put forth the question of just why a Black man would want to represent the United States of America. For good or ill, in Brave New World that question has gone either unanswered or been papered over with platitudes. And while that might be unsurprising given Disney and its corporate interests, matters aren’t helped by virtue of the film being exceptionally boring and shoddily crafted.
Brave New World opens with Cap and the new Falcon, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), busting up a deal between bad guys in order to steal and sell some dangerous tech. That leads to some honors from the newly elected president, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, formerly played by William Hurt (RIP) but here replaced by Harrison Ford. Ross has been an antagonist of our superheroes since all the way back in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, to which this latest MCU confection winds up being something of a sequel more than anything else. Ross is determined to make Sam the country’s most famous superhero, and he’s also determined to sign a treaty with Japan to harvest the new element Adamantium from the corpse of the giant celestial god/robot/thing that has been stuck in the middle of the ocean since the end of The Eternals, a movie that time forgot but Marvel insists that you now remember.
What follows this table setting bears all the hallmarks of a movie that reportedly underwent multiple rounds of reshoots over several years, with subplots abruptly dropped, oodles of ADR’d dialogue, and entire scenes featuring characters plunked in front of greenscreen backdrops — not to replicate vast locations, but for stuff like parking lots and rooms — with none of the actors seeming to occupy the same spaces at all. Giancarlo Esposito even shows up, for no discernible reason, as a thrown-away, second-string baddie, while Brave New World‘s action is likewise a complete dud, delivering more of the now MCU-standard digital smear. It’s a real shame, since the four-color pop and original dazzle in watching VFX realize all these fun superpowers in the first stretch of these films (now over a decade ago) was not an inconsiderable part of their initial appeal. And so, when President Ross finally turns into a big red Hulk of his own — brain-bustingly named in the comics… Red Hulk — in the finale, the fight feels both perfunctory and entirely weightless.
The same can be said of Brave New World’s alleged politics. Certainly Marvel could not have predicted the future, but a story in which a Black soldier still “believes the best” about a President who turns into a massive rage monster and smashes everything in his path does, to say the least, an inadvertent but still very poor job of reading the room. Wilson’s new Captain America status is starting to seem less like representation and more like tokenism, which is both alarming and sad. And the less said about a new character, Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Hass), the better, as the character is explicitly coded as Israeli in the comics but that has been erased here better to avoid offending anyone or having anything to say at all about America’s role in world conflict. Brave New World isn’t just a grand missed opportunity, but is simply more of the same soulless, crass, and entirely neutered product for which the MCU project has slowly but surely become known.
DIRECTOR: Julius Onah; CAST: Anthony Mackie, Harrison Ford, Tim Blake Nelson, Liv Tyler, Danny Ramirez; DISTRIBUTOR: Walt Disney Pictures; IN THEATERS: February 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 58 min.
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