Captain America: Brave New World: a dull Marvel content medley
The MCU’s latest outing, starring Harrison Ford as the hulk and Anthony Mackie as Captain America, is built from the foundations of some of the least-liked Marvel film and TV-projects.
A rage monster president is beholden to a big-brain misfit, bringing America to the brink of war with an ally over an island rich in (un)natural resources. Heroes who’ve assumed the role of Captain America before and after Golden Boy Steve Rogers struggle as a new administration abandons values they’ve fought for.
If anything, the latest instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe saga is too on the nose in its contemporary relevance – with the perhaps sobering footnote that this Prez and his pet mad scientist are more nuanced than their real-world equivalents. Ex-‘Hulk Hunter’ Thaddeus Ross – Harrison Ford replacing William Hurt (and, for those with longer memories, Sam Elliott) – threatens to end the world with a tantrum but is ultimately on a comics-style arc of redemption. The wish-fulfilment aspect of Marvel movies has never been more apparent.
The multi-authored screenplay entrusted to director Julius Onah, best-known for the okayish The Cloverfield Paradox (2018), draws as much from Hulk back issues as a comics run which promotes former-Falcon Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) to the Captaincy and gives him a shield to go with his wings.
The handover of a heroic identity from a popular star and character (Chris Evans as Steve) to a former sidekick was always going to be a hard sell. And even with the Spider-Verse precedent of Miles Morales joining a host of variant Peter Parkers, casting a Black Captain America has provoked racist responses to the film on social media. It was risky to build a plot on foundations laid down in The Incredible Hulk (2008) and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), among the least-liked Marvel film/TV projects. But here we are with Sam Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), mutated in an aside in a 17 year-old film, as a generic mastermind, while Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), ‘the forgotten Cap’ from the miniseries, is the mistreated hero Sam is out to exonerate and (of course) avenge.
The genre of the last two Captain America movies was ‘corridors-of-power conspiracy thriller’. This follows suit with less spirit. Plot points get explained by villains with a need to share between action sequences, which feel a little mundane this far into the franchise. The MCU oddly tends to skimp on the widescreen spectacular material of the comics: a shoot-out in an underlit White House is much less impressive than the mutant raid on the Oval Office in X-2 (2003); and the finale is a rote slugfest between stand-ins for the much-missed Steve Rogers and Bruce Banner whose super-abilities boil down to thumping and jumping while looking very angry.
► Captain America: Brave New World is in UK cinemas now.