Craptacular Impression

My thoughts on Captain America: Brave New World

With the exception of last summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine, the last few installments of the much-vaunted Marvel Cinematic Universe have not exactly resonated that strongly with viewers—sure, things like Thor: Love and Thunder and Guardians of the Galaxy 3 may have made money, but do you actually know anyone who genuinely loved or who can even remember anything from them? As a result, the latest entry, Captain America: Brave New World, feels like a conscious effort to give the franchise a bit of a jump start—not only does it feature one of its best-known heroes in the first vehicle centered primarily around them since 2016’s Captain America: Civil War but it allows Anthony Mackie to take on his first big screen outing as the character following the 2021 TV series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Alas, the resulting film is yet another misfire, a deeply mediocre piece of product that feels like something assembled by committee rather than by anyone with a particular vision of the story that they wanted to tell.

As this one opens, Cap, a.k.a. Sam Wilson, has just saved the day by breaking up a deal involving a stolen sample of the highly valuable element known as adamantium when he is summoned to the White House to meet with the newly elected President, Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford, replacing the late William Hurt), who has two request for him—he wants him to reform the Avengers and to attend a reception to announce an all-important treaty involving the use of the newly emerged island where the adamantium is found. Although he has misgivings about Ross—who had previously tried to hunt down former Avengers like Bruce Banner—he agrees to both the reformation and the reception, bringing along his Falcon trainee, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), and Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), who has his own bone to pick with Ross, having himself been a super soldier who was imprisoned and experimented on for over three decades.

At the reception, things quickly go sideways when Isaiah and four other people get up during Ross’s speech and attempt to assassinate him. Ross and his head of security, Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), an Israeli who had been a part of the Black Widow program, are ready to close the investigation quickly, Sam defies orders to prove his friend’s innocence and indeed, it appears that they were all triggered by a mysterious light emanating from their cellphones. Although Ross demands that Sam stand down before jetting off in an attempt to salvage the rapidly disintegrating treaty, he continues to investigate what he believes to some kind of conspiracy. This eventually leads to the requisite off-grid military base that is holding Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), a cellular biologist who—for those of you who remember The Incredible Hulk will recall—had his blood mixed with that of Bruce Banner, transforming him into a weirdo mutant whose brains are on the outside and who can calculate virtually anything. For the last couple of decades he has been the off-the-books prisoner of Ross but it turns out that their is much more to their relationship—Sterns has been holding the cards all along and is just about ready to play his trump card by helping to goad him into a war with Japan for his amusement and to destroy his captor’s legacy.

If there is an unexpected development to be had in Brave New World, it is in the fact that it is a film that pretty much requires you to have not only seen one of the least memorable entries in the entire MCU but requires you to have seen it roughly 10 minutes before sitting through this one. This one is slightly better than The Incredible Hulk, I suppose, but it isn’t that much better and its flaws are more troubling. The screenplay, which was cooked up by five credited writers, has the choppy feel of something that went through numerous rewrites during the production process to such a degree that it is little more than a series of events in search of a narrative thread with more attention paid to inserting in-jokes, references to past adventures and cameo appearances than anything else. (Even though it is actually one of the shorter MCU films to date, it feels endless.) The Ruth Bat-Hassan character, for example, is introduced with no small amount of fanfare but outside of her smacking around a few bad guys at one point, so little is done with her that you wonder why they even bothered. Meanwhile, Big Bad Sterns is so trite and unmemorable that once he is introduced, I just assumed that he was a diversion and that the real villain was still on the way. The direction by Julius Onah, whose previous efforts have covered the gamut from the dreadful The Cloverfield Paradox (which was, until last Sunday, the biggest Super Bowl-related disaster in some time) to the intriguing Luce, demonstrates absolute no recognizable personality—outside of a couple of nice moments during the opening fight scene, the actions scenes are the usual sludge and he just hurries through what passes for character-driven moments in order to keep viewers from thinking about how silly and creaky the whole enterprise really is.

There are more bothersome aspects to the film as well. Face it, the notion of a black Captain America alone is enough to get lots of people upset for reasons that need not be explained. Considering that the character has generally been an idealist who fights exclusively for what is right, even when it goes against the prevailing political winds, this casting could have led to some potentially provocative moments that might have given the film some genuine dramatic heft by raising the stakes to something more important that which person wins in the inevitable climactic brawl. That aspect seems to have been removed from this particular iteration and leaves Mackie with little to work with in terms of his character. Even more discomfiting is the character of Isaiah, who clearly is meant to evoke the way that African-Americans have been mistreated by the military over the decades in ways ranging from racism to experimentation. Here, they introduce both him and his suffering at the hands of the country that he served but then the film does absolutely nothing of consequence with this narrative strand, taking the injustice that the character represents and reducing it to just another clumsy plot device.

The only things that make Brave New World remotely tolerable, at least in fits and starts, are a couple of the performances. Although whatever edge that his character might have once had has been removed, Mackie still manages to demonstrate no small amount of charm as Captain America, enough to make you look forward to what he could do with the role with the aid of a better script. Likewise, Ford is hobbled with a character who hasn’t been developed particularly well and whose big secret has been inexplicably blown by the film’s own publicity machine, but he still manages to work in a couple of nice moments here and there due almost entirely to the force of his own star charisma, not to mention our memories of similar roles that he has played in the past. The one who makes the strongest impression, however, is Giancarlo Esposito, who turns up in a few scenes early on as one of the people involved with the thwarted adamantium deal. Although his character is essentially superfluous to the proceedings (he vanishes so abruptly from the proceedings that his character feels like another victim of rewrites and reshoots), Esposito brings an actual sense of personality to the material that is mostly lacking otherwise and leaves you hoping that he will turn up again in more favorable surroundings at some point down the line.

Neither a work of contemporary pop cinema eerily reflecting the times in which it is being released (it does revolves around a president whose dirty dealings and chaotic inner rage issues are manipulated by a malevolent genius in way that are potentially destructive to the world at large) or just as a big blockbuster entertainment to while away a Saturday night, Captain America: Brave New World comes up woefully short. Instead of serving as a kickoff for a new direction to the MCU, it feels like a placeholder that exists only to bring some quick money into the coffers after a shaky couple of years without shaking things up too much. It will almost certainly make a ton of money, so mission accomplished, but my guess is that, much like its unexpected precursor, it is a film that you will struggle to recall anything about a few months from now.