Captain America: Brave New World Full Of Old Problems (Spoilers)

It’s tough to review a movie that is simply … OK. Captain America: Brave New World is a movie with good parts and pretty bad parts that all adds up to an MCU movie that slots right in the middle of the pack. Not as bad as Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and not nearly as good as the movie it wants to be, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The fourth Captain America movie, and the first with Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) as the title hero, has been out for almost one week now, so this will be a spoiler review. If I was able to make it to the press screening last Tuesday this would be a spoiler-free review, but I watched it like the majority of you all, after it premiered.

So, once again, this will be a review with spoilers. If you don’t want the movie to be spoiled, you should stop here and don’t read below the break line.

The story
The movie opens with Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford, taking over from the late William Hurt) making his first speech as the new president of the U.S. Then there is a pretty exciting action sequence with Captain America that introduces the new Falcon, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) carrying over from the series Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Afterward, Ross invites Sam and Joaquin to the White House for the opening of final treaty negotiations with Japan and the rest of the world about what to do with resources in the dead Celestial in the Indian Ocean, from the movie The Eternals. Sam convinces Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), also a carry over from his previous series, to join them. At the opening event, Bradley suddenly grabs a gun from a Secret Service agent and attempts to shoot Ross. Other people in the audience at the event also try to shoot him, as well as other government officials. Bradley is captured, imprisoned awaiting trial, and the movie becomes a mystery about who caused Bradley and the others to become seemingly mind-controlled murder bots.

There are more exciting action sequences with chase scenes, on-street gun fights, in-air fights and combat — all very reminiscent of Winter Soldier. There’s a big villain reveal, and eventually the transformation of Ross into the Red Hulk.

The bad and the good
And that gets to the main problem with this movie — it’s more a sequel to the 2008 film The Incredible Hulk than it is a Captain America sequel. The main villain is Tim Blake Nelson as Samuel Sterns from that movie, now with full on gamma-mutated brain and greenish skin. Gone are the themes from Sam’s series about the challenges a black hero would face taking on the title of the most-loved white hero in existence. The trailers and commercials try to make you think it’s still there with Ross telling Sam, “You’re not Steve Rogers.” but that is just one toss-off line in an argument that is a bad example of dramatic dialogue used to drive the characters to a point that moves the plot. Not a word of it is convincing.

Which is a shame, because Brave New World does pull off some good writing on the interpersonal drama and lighter moments. And the actors work with those good bits quite well. Mackie seems to have grown into the idea of playing Cap as a leader, and his emotional moments with Bradley or lighter moments with Joaquin are impactful or fun. And Ford delivers the goods as Ross, clearly having a great time playing a deeply conflicted powerful character. The writers gave him the only real character arc in the movie, and Ford turns Ross from a one-note antagonist (as previously played by both Hurt and Sam Elliott) into a much more interesting and complex character.

Aside from those moments of good writing and solid action scenes, the other big problem with the movie is that Sterns’ plot to turn Ross into the Red Hulk is based on a timeline that doesn’t make sense. Ross used Sterns as a fall guy for the destruction of Harlem in The Incredible Hulk and has had him imprisoned since then. When Ross discovered he had a terminal and untreatable heart condition, he reached a deal with Sterns, who would cure him in exchange for Ross releasing him once he became president. Ross betrayed Sterns and didn’t release him as promised, and Sterns tells Sam that is why he is turning Ross into the Red Hulk. But the transformation started with the research Stern did on Ross and is delivered via the pills he uses to treat his heart condition — years before Ross was elected and betrayed Sterns. The motivation happens years after the plan is put into place — cart before the horse.

Sterns is supposed to be a super genius, yet he puts into place a scheme less effective than Zemo did in Captain America: Civil War, a character not sporting a gamma-mutated super-brain.

I don’t feel qualified to talk too much about all the rewrites and reshoots, but they introduced two mostly useless characters in Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) and Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas). Esposito is excellent in his useless role, but Haas is clearly miscast. Those post-pandemic reshoots are obvious in the odd edits and ADR, and they make the movie less tight and cohesive than Winter Soldier, despite the attempt to make it a political thriller in the sense that Winter Soldier was a spy thriller.

Overall, Captain America: Brave New World is a decent at-home action MCU movie, as long as you don’t want it to be anything but OK. Which, considering the high quality of all previous movies in the franchise, makes it clear that Brave New World is the weakest of the lot.

I give Captain America: Brave New World (Marvel Studios; PG-13; 1 hr 58 mins ) a 2.5 out of 5.