Captain America: Brave New World Offers More of the Same

Another Marvel movie! Yay?

For good reasons, Paddington in Peru defeated Captain America: Brave New World by twenty points in the weekly poll to determine which new movie I will watch and write about.

However, I try to see all the new children's movies with my ten-year-old son Declan, who has been in Mexico for a wedding. I didn’t want to see it without him, so I figured I would make my life more difficult by watching and writing about two movies instead of one.

I saw Captain America: Brave New World out of a weary sense of obligation. As an American, I feel like it is my duty to see every Marvel movie. I’m not entirely sure why. I don’t feel the same obligation to the DC cinematic universe.

The MCU is a much stronger brand than the DCU, but both are currently running on fumes. The boom is over. We are in bust times now.

Like everyone, I am exhausted and overwhelmed by the glut of superhero product flooding the market. That’s what these movies are: product. They’re shiny consumer goods in movie form.

Everything post-Avengers: Endgame feels strangely anti-climactic. That is particularly true of Captain America: Brave New World, which feels like a wish.com version of the Captain America films that preceded it.

Chris Evans’ time-warped super-soldier has retired with dignity. This leaves Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson to take over as Captain America. Since Sam received a big promotion, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) has filled his position as half-assed B-list superhero Falcon.

Ramirez and Mackie are equally underwhelming in roles that inspire nostalgia for Chris Evans’s incarnation of Captain America. Evans played the role with a light touch missing from Captain America: New World Order.

Mackie is an accomplished dramatic actor, but his smoldering intensity in the role feels one-note and dour.

Captain America: Brave New World takes itself far more seriously than a movie in which the President of the United States hulks out and transforms into a giant red monster should.

Harrison Ford, who is fucking ripped for an eighty-two-year-old stoner, portrays President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, a former general negotiating a treaty with the Japanese Prime Minister.

If you asked me what the fourth Captain America film was about, I would reply, half-kiddingly, that it’s about a treaty. That stupid treaty is referenced constantly and in an incredibly clumsy, ham-fisted fashion.

If you were to make a drinking game of taking a shot every time the word “treaty” is uttered, you’d die of alcohol poisoning within the first hour. “Treaty” functions here the way “meetings” and “contracts” do in movies about businessmen. We know that Captain America: New World Order is political because of the central role the President plays in it and because a treaty is constantly being referenced, not because it has anything to say about the fraught world that we live in.

Captain America: Brave New World is an apolitical political thriller and a movie in which a black man takes over as one of the most iconic characters in pop culture that feels strangely skittish about addressing race.

The closest this comes to addressing race and, by extension, racism, is through the character of Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), a Korean veteran who was experimented upon with a super-soldier serum for three decades.

It’s difficult, if not impossible, to see this character outside the context of the Tuskegee Experiment and the government’s long, horrific history of experimenting on black people.

Lumbly gives the prickly, weary character a fundamental sense of dignity and authority, but the filmmakers seem to be interested in him mainly as a plot point. The superpowered old man uses an invitation to the White House as an excuse to shoot at the president, but he’s not acting of his own volition. Instead, he’s part of a one-size-fits-all brainwashing scheme dreamed up by mad scientist Samuel Sterns.

Samuel Sterns is played by Tim Blake Nelson, who originated the role in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. Like Isaiah Bradley, the puke-green supervillain was imprisoned by a corrupt and abusive government.

The government experimented on the scientist. They made him a super-genius and a super-freak. In both garb and ideology, the super-villain known as The Leader resembles the Unabomber, another casual dresser with a bone to pick with Uncle Sam.

Giancarlo Esposito, as Seth Voelker / Sidewinder, the leader of the Serpent Society, rounds out a killer collection of killers.

Sidewinder is a supervillain whose superpower is being very good and enthusiastic about killing people. The juicy role is a terrific vehicle for the actor’s charisma and dark magnetism.

I was both disappointed and relieved to discover that in the comic books, at least, he takes the whole “snake” thing very seriously and has a look that reflects his unhealthy affection for reptiles. I also like that the character is canonically from Kenosha, Wisconsin, but at no point does he talk about cheese, which is unrealistic. I went to college in Madison and can talk about cheese curds and artisanal cheese until the cows come home. I can also talk about cows. They’re another Midwestern staple.

I would have appreciated it if Sidewinder had been a cheese-themed bad guy rather than a snake-themed bad guy, but that might be too silly for a movie in which the president transforms into the Red Hulk and causes an international incident.

Esposito missed an opportunity to look like a real jackass.

I expected Ford to sleepwalk through a profoundly silly motion picture, but he’s surprisingly invested and engaged. Then again, it’d be a mistake to underplay a character whose defining characteristic is that he transforms into a monster when angry.

Early in the film, President Red Hulk asks Captain America to re-form the Avengers, but if you’re jonesing for a Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johannsen, or Robert Downey Jr. cameo, you’re out of luck, although a cameo by Falcon’s pal Bucky Barnes, AKA the Winter Soldier, proves a highlight while underlining the lack of chemistry between Mackie and Ramirez.

Captain America: Brave New World is very aggressively nothing special. It’s watchable and reasonably engaging while adding next to nothing to the MCU.

It will take a lot more than this to rouse the MCU out of its extended funk. This feels less like a new beginning for Captain America than a forgettable ending.

Two and a half stars out of five