Captain America: Brave New World (2025 | USA | 118 minutes | Julius Onah)
Ah, Valentine’s Day. A perfect night for taking your sweetheart to the movies to puzzle over a mega-studio’s increasingly uninspired efforts to right a sinking ship by plundering incredibly old intellectual property and paying one of the most charismatic actors of the last half century to sleepwalk through a clunky script. A tradition unlike any other!
This year’s new installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe returns to the Captain America franchise and it’s general vibe of working in the mode of a Cold War spy thriller, except with few of the thrills, very little of the intrigue, and none of the Chris Evans as Steve Rodgers as the Captain America that audiences had come to know and love. Indeed, it’s been six long years in our timeline since the unfrozen super soldier exited the scene, having left his star spangled shield behind for some much-deserved time-travel shore leave. In undoing Thanos’s misguided environmentalism, the Avengers may have succeeded in restoring the Universe to its full overcrowded population, but to a degree, nothing since has been quite right since Earth’s greatest heroes unblipped the Snap.
Stepping into the void is Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, a.k.a., the third-tier Avenger formerly known as Falcon. Whereas Rodgers was a scrawny kid who got shot up with super powers to fight the Nazis and re-emerged decades later from the icy depths to save the Universe, his replacement is “the guy with a jetpack — no, not War Machine, the one with wings”). Sure, there’s something cool about a Black guy stepping up as Captain America, but all of that’s kind of obviated by no one knowing exactly what Captain America is anymore and Sam Wilson having no real personality, sense of humor, or motivation. Like many of the other mediocre-to-poor films in this interminable post-Endgame era, this one relies on a Disney+ series (the widely panned, better-left forgotten Falcon & the Winter Soldier) to provide backstory and context (believe me, it’s not worth it).
Sam’s wings have been upgraded to Wakandan vibranium to match Steve’s old shield, which would be neat if they weren’t such an obvious casualty of budget cuts and underpaid animators. His AI robot helper drone “Redbird” might just be the film’s most capable character, to the point that one wonders why bother with any human heroes at all. It’s not clear who the Captain works for or where he gets the cash for the sleek man-cave that he shares with his would-be sidekick (Danny Ramirez as Joaquin Torres) who’s left to play dress up in Sam’s cast-off Falcon costume. Early in the film, their main duties appear to be crashing into US military covert operations in not entirely helpful ways — tasked with recovering a stolen MacGuffin, he instead goes rogue, saves some priests, gets into some fights, spoils a surprise strike by a SEAL team, and lets the package get away. Nothing about his role gets any more coherent from there.
The Brave New World of the title isn’t exactly a riff on the Huxley novel or Shakespeare quote, but rather an indication of the cobbled together nature of the script, a churn through existing property, mixed up, thrown at the wall, in hopes that the slop keeps us occupied for a couple hours. For instance, we re-enter the MCU timeline with the election of Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross as president of the whole US of A. Having been previously portrayed as a ballistic Hulk-creating, Sokovia-proposing, Avengers antagonist by William Hurt, the character’s been rebooted here by Harrison Ford, who’s mercifully been allowed to shed the trademark mustache and adopted a blandly conciliatory role of “togetherness” to get elected.
Ford kind of dodders his way through a role that gives him little in terms of explaining his change of heart beyond being an old man who feels bad that his daughter still hates him for turning her boyfriend into a Hulk. [Astonishingly, this film relies heavily on the happenings of 2008 film The Incredible Hulk — the one where Ed Norton took over for Eric Bana before the role was filled by Mark Ruffalo.] The marketing materials have done little to conceal the red flags that Ross is concealing a hulk-sized secret; so rather than having any political philosophy that could alienate any viewer, the character’s shuffled around the board with the primary character trait of “uh oh, maybe this guy with a lot of power who’s constantly popping mysterious little pills has a problematic temper”.
His main priority seems to be briefly making gestures at working with the new Captain America so that he can re-start the Avengers (it’s here that I realized that I had no idea that there weren’t any Avengers anymore) and getting world leaders to sign a treaty related to sharing the spoils of a goddamn Celestial having emerged in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Yes, that’s right! After being memory-holed for eight films since we learn that the cataclysmic world event that concluded The Eternals is still part of the sacred timeline. Confoundingly, this giant robot emerging from the center of the earth wasn’t turned to stone, but instead has been a source of yet-unseen scientific and technological progress, including a new better metal that might be familiar to followers of Wolverine lore [somehow the absence of adamantium in this movie’s history must play into whatever happened in Deadpool & Wolverine, but I’ll leave that to the nerds to dissect since this film has also no interest in it beyond laying an easter egg and smirking at the camera.]
A conspiracy thriller in which a new president faces an assassination attempt, meddling from shadowy interests, amid global turmoil over precious resources that could lead to world war is a pretty fascinating set-up for grounding a superhero movie in the mechanics of our real world. But, despite the potential of exploring the representation embodied by a new Captain America and inclusion of Isaiah Bradley as a super-soldier done very wrong by the American government, the film’s promise escapes Nigerian director Julius Onah’s (The Cloverfield Paradox, Luce) grasp at every turn. The screenplay — credited to five writers — is dumbed-down to neither delight or offend, making the two hour running-time feel much longer. The story points creak mightily, no surprise given the film’s delayed release and extensive reshoots. Such is the cobbled-together nature of the film that Giancarlo Esposito turns in a trademark menacing performance as a secondary side villain while rarely sharing a frame as any other key actor. At least one can sense the mirth that he takes from collecting the paycheck. The same can’t be said of the film’s primary antagonist, whose interactions are almost entirely communicated by phone and shot in such extreme shadow that it further strains a viewer’s memory to recall who he’s playing or how he fits into the story.
Despite their collective talents, all of the actors seem resigned to painfully flat line-readings that appreciate how that the film’s most-likely fate will be as Disney+ background viewing. Even Harrison Ford frequently looks confused about what he’s gotten himself into and isn’t able to act his way out of the mess. Periodic exposition dumps insure that the clunky plot can be caught up while glimpsing up from one’s phone. Similarly, while there are a few shots to evoke better political thrillers, the film generally looks bland and uninspired, the fight sequences are sloppily reliant on a shield bouncing off walls, and the action sequences of superheroes and fighter jets jostling through the skies are incoherent despite being mostly CGI.
The whole film is a long tease to get to the big Red Hulk promised by the poster and trailer. While the splashy confrontation doesn’t pay off the long wait to get there, you do have to give credit to whoever decided to release a movie about a creepy loner pulling strings in the shadows to suit his own purposes and a giant red easily-aggrieved rage monster smashing up the White House in the early days of 2025. If only the movie had the courage (or even the interest) to interrogate the images of our nation’s capitol’s most iconic sights and cherished memorials being reduced to rubble. While it doesn’t quite do that, at least the inadvertent timeliness extends to giving us a new track from Kendrick Lamar, fresh off his Grammy and Super Bowl triumphs, to keep us company during the closing titles.
Captain America: Brave New World arrives in a bazillion theaters on February 14
Lead image, credit Eli Adé courtesy Marvel.