by Nick Ferro, Contributing Writer
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has had its ups and downs since 2019, which, sadly, seems to be in large part due to factors outside of Kevin Feige’s control. Global pandemics, CEO changes, deaths of actors, and Sony being… difficult, to name a few. You can read my full thoughts on Phase 4 of the MCU elsewhere, so I won’t elaborate on the details, but the short version is, they’ve had some struggles. It feels like they’ve been yo-yoing back and forth, hitting everything from great to bad for several years now. And each time audiences walk in hoping that this next one will be the one to put the MCU back on track. For the most part, they are trying to right the ship, but it has been especially frustrating to watch them falter for years now, with no solid grasp on whether they are actually going to sink or swim.
At first, it felt like Captain America: Brave New World would be the movie to kick off this new era of storytelling in the MCU. However, after reports of multiple failed test screenings and endless reshoots as recent as only a few months prior to release, it seemed that it would be another miss for the MCU. I couldn’t help but think about The Marvels, which was so clearly cut to death in the editing room, turning what was most likely a 150-minute story of redemption for Carol Danvers, with the help of her new allies, into a 90-minute zany adventure with jokes, cameos, and baby alien kitties. I personally enjoyed The Marvels a lot because it was a light and breezy adventure, even though I was disappointed that Marvel essentially made a really shoddy movie otherwise. So was Captain America going to suffer the same fate as Captain Marvel? My hopes were no, but my gut was telling me yes, so I was extremely surprised when it turned out to be: only kinda sorta.
Brave New World tells the story of General Thunderbolt Ross, now played by Harrison Ford after the passing of the great William Hurt, after his first 100 days as President of the United States. President Ross is in the midst of a treaty negotiation with other countries of the world to peacefully co-own the giant celestial sticking out of the Indian Ocean after the events of Eternals. When a canister of the new element harvested from Celestial Island is stolen by Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito), Sam Wilson, a.k.a., Captain America (Anthony Mackie), is called in to recover the stolen goods. This kicks off a series of events which leads to an assassination attempt on the president by Sam’s friend and mentor, retired super soldier Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly). In order to clear Bradley’s name, Sam and his new sidekick Joaquin Torres, a.k.a., The Falcon (Danny Ramirez), need to solve the mystery of who is behind the assassination attempt, and why. What they discover is that someone is brainwashing people to take control of them in hopes of ruining Ross’ credibility and plunging the United States into a war with Japan.
This film is saved from suffering the same fate as The Marvels, as it hides the edits, reshoots, and story inconsistencies a lot better. Someone who sees 100 movies a year is going to be able to clock them pretty quickly, but for those who only see a few, I don’t think its glaringly obvious, which is a big step up from The Marvels. There are some pretty bad shot/reverse shot scenes that reek of reshoots and a lack of dynamic filmmaking, but I am willing to let those slide, because the story is much more cohesive. For the most part, the pacing is pretty decent, with new information fed to the audience and plenty of action scenes to break up the exposition. The movie actually feels in structure an awful lot like Captain America: The Winter Soldier. An action set piece with a MacGuffin kicks off the plot, Cap has to go on the run with a Falcon, a “Widow” gets involved, they go to a secret bunker and meet a villain, they learn that the villain has something to do with brainwashing, a brainwashed super soldier is involved, a person in power has a villain moment. Oh, and there is a scene in a hospital where Cap is watching someone in surgery with at least three shot-for-shot recreations from Winter Soldier. You would think that this would be an award-winning formula. But where The Winter Soldier is a 70s spy thriller, Brave New World is like the ‘90s equivalent that doesn’t quite nail the tone, but amps up the action.
Sadly, where the movie doesn’t work for me is the chemistry between these characters. Mackie has great chemistry with both Chris Evans and Sebastian Stan. Seeing them on screen together is part of what makes The Winter Soldier and Falcon and the Winter Soldier work. They are just a more natural fit than Mackie and Ramirez. I don’t know if Marvel thought because Mackie was the comic relief in several movies, he had to have someone who was even more of a comic relief, but the new combo doesn’t work well together. Who does work well with Mackie is Lumbly, whose stern exterior and serious nature plays well off of Mackie’s more relaxed comedic style. There is a scene where the two of them are training in a gym, and I could have watched a whole montage of them hanging out because of how great they are together. Mackie knows how to be serious when he needs to be, but as everyone likes to remind him, he isn’t Steve Rogers, and giving him a quirky comic sidekick forces him to try and be more like Rogers than he should. Mackie plays better off of Shira Haas’ Ruth Bat-Seraph, head of Ross’ security, but she is given so little to do that I really couldn’t tell if they had any chemistry at all. And based on a random costume change that she has in the third act, my guess is most of her scenes were left on the cutting room floor.
Everyone is talking about how Harrison Ford showed up and delivered an amazing performance, and how he didn’t have to try, but he did, so he should be commended. This notion annoys me, because yes, Ford is an amazing actor and a professional. Even in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, he showed up and tried. He is great in this movie, but not in any way that stands out among his recent work, like Shrinking.
There are, however, two performances that I feel require special attention, and those are Mackie and Lumbly’s. These two are giving it all they have with their own particular challenges. Mackie is doing double duty of taking on the mantle of Cap, while also having to stay true to who Sam is as a character. He also has to balance being funny without seeming like Ant-man, and being serious without being too much like Steve Rogers. He nails this balancing act, despite some of the dialogue and script choices making it an uphill battle. On the other end of the spectrum, Lumbly has the most emotional moments of the movie as a Black man who has been abused by the system, and who is in a way experiencing a second chance through his mentorship and friendship with Sam. He delivers a heartfelt performance, adding himself to the long list of actors who deserve to be in the awards conversation for their MCU performance, but probably never will. Thanks a lot, awards voters… Mackie and Lumbly have only a handful of moments together, but the more they are on screen together, the more annoyed I am that they weren’t the main characters of a story just about them, Lethal Weapon style.
Then there are the real-world optics of the movie, which for some people might not matter, but with the current climate in the country politically, they’re hard not to focus on. And nothing stood out to me more than for the first time on the big screen, watching a Captain America movie featuring the character played by a Black man, and rather than celebrate that, the movie feels more like a sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. President Ross is the first person on screen, and is given more emotional weight in the movie surrounding both his temperament and coming to terms with his past. He is essentially the driver of the proverbial movie car with the decisions he makes and the focus that is given to him. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that he ends up becoming the final conflict when he lets his anger take control, and he is the character who learns something in the end.
This is just a sneaky backdoor Hulk movie that they forgot to invite Mark Ruffalo to join. With a few tweaks, this entire movie could have been solely a Hulk story, and at times Captain America feels like a side character. And that is incredibly disappointing. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been wanting a sequel to The Incredible Hulk for years, but I had the same critique of Thor: Ragnarok. Yet with Ragnarok, we were getting a third entry to a character who had been the lead of several movies. This is Sam Wilson’s first time being Captain America, and he is relegated to sitting shotgun in his own movie.
It doesn’t help that the half of the movie which does have Sam Wilson front and center is spent expositing information or watered down lines that were already said or explained better in Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The speech that Sam gives at the end of that show about how he is a Black man wearing the stars and stripes, how that will upset people, and how he can feel that anger in that moment was powerful. In this movie, he says almost the exact same thing to Ross at one point, but it is the CliffsNotes version, and it is frustrating that he couldn’t express something new, or find a better way to convey the information. It is frustrating that the filmmakers couldn’t find a thematic way to weave the speech into the story the movie tells. It is frustrating that the studio felt not enough people watched the TV show that they needed to repeat themselves here just in case. It is frustrating that Anthony Mackie isn’t given the same respect that Chadwick Boseman was given in Black Panther, by having a movie that is his own to shine. Sam Wilson can declare that simply being Captain America will upset people and someone, whether it be on the studio level or the Disney level, decided to ignore that message, and that’s very disappointing.
My last point will be the age old, tired complaint of superhero movies delivering a film with unfinished CGI. I want to praise the team who worked on the Red Hulk’s animations. It is so very clear that they started day one with those sequences, and had plenty of time to polish them to look great. However, it is so incredibly clear when people, places, or things are digitally added, and the effects teams had a lot less time to complete their work. If you told me that the main villain of this movie was a 100% CGI creation that they added three weeks ago, I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m not even sure the actor was actually in the movie — he could’ve just gotten credit for some ADR work. When the CGI in this movie is incomplete, it isn’t just noticeable; it is unpleasantly distracting. Even in scenes as simple as Sam being the only person in the frame, it is so obvious that he is standing on a green set as part of a reshoot. I am not even convinced that Liv Tyler, reprising her role as Betty Ross, was ever on set with anyone, and that the phone call where you only heard her voice was either bad ADR or it was AI. But I suppose if I’m not sure whether or not some actors were actually on set with each other while filming their scenes, then maybe it wasn’t as unfinished as it could have been.
All the negative feedback aside, part of why I liked this movie overall was because of how at the end of the day, it does feel more like an adventure taking place in a universe that was built to let all of these characters exist together. I do think they could have incorporated more characters like Rhodey, Bucky, or even Bruce Banner, but then you get into a much bigger budget and story. Every movie can’t be a mini-Avengers movie, no matter how much I want it to be. Many people are complaining that this movie tries to tie up too many loose ends left by the MCU, but I disagree. I think it ties up the perfect amount of loose ends, while also pointing ahead to the future. Brave New World actually does a nice job of making me feel like the studio is starting to right the ship. I don’t think we are going to get that extra amazing movie that audiences will be blown away by just yet, but I also think audiences need to stop putting that expectation on these movies. If you remember, after Iron Man in 2008, no one was blown away by The Incredible Hulk, Thor, The First Avenger, or even Iron Man 2. It wasn’t until The Avengers in 2012 that people understood what was happening, and even after that, no one was blown away by Thor: The Dark World, Iron Man 3, Age of Ultron, or Ant-Man. Go back and try to remember that of the 12 movies in Phases 1 and 2, only four of them (Iron Man, Avengers, The Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy) were smash hits both critically and commercially. The MCU has double the output now, so it only feels like the number of misses is greater than it used to be, but percentage wise they are about the same as they have been. I for one think that Captain America: Brave New World happens to be on par with movies in the early phases. It is not going to be a hit, but it is not as bad as some of the more recent disappointments (looking at you, Ant-Man 3). It is simply an okay movie with some glaring issues. For some, that won’t be a problem, for others, it will be impossible to look past. But for me, I can only hope that Mackie gets another chance to actually LEAD a movie in future, and hopefully he will be front and center to lead the Avengers, or the Thunderbolts, or whatever team is formed to fight whatever multiversal threat this movie’s end credit scene teases.
Rating: It Was Just Okay
Captain America: Brave New World is currently playing in theaters
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