VERDICT: The thrill isn’t exactly gone from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it surfaces all too infrequently in this latest installment, which feels both thin and overstuffed.
The Andy Griffith Show was a TV behemoth in the 1960s, lasting for eight seasons. The show amassed enough goodwill that, after the titular star (along with future filmmaker Ron Howard) left the series, a spinoff featuring all the supporting characters lasted for another three seasons under the name Mayberry R.F.D. With Captain America: Brave New World, it seems the Marvel Cinematic Universe is entering its Mayberry R.F.D. years, with the major marquee names just a memory, and the secondary characters doing their best to fill those shoes (and capes).
The Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier proved that Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson was a rich enough character to keep audiences engaged even after the departure of Chris Evans as Steve Rogers; this first big-screen outing with Mackie as Captain America, unfortunately, strips away character and theme to focus on incident and explosions, resulting in a movie that feels simultaneously thin and overstuffed.
Some ideas are lurking in the corner of this superhero saga, which required a quintet of credited writers (including director Julius Onah, whose previous credits include Luce and The Cloverfield Paradox): Sam has an unspoken need to deliver as a Black superhero taking over Rogers — that conflict is most evident in the casual condescension of president Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford, taking over for the late William Hurt) — as well as Sam’s articulated struggle with being a human hero and not a meta-human one, since he was never injected with the Super Soldier serum that gave powers to his predecessor.
But in the same way that Kevin Feige and the other Marvel powers that be kept The Marvels from being too idiosyncratic, they’ve kept Captain America: Brave New World from being too complex. The timing is perfect for a film about a civil servant of color dealing with an unhinged, reactionary POTUS, but the film skirts politics as much as it avoids depth of character. They’ve got stuff to blow up.
The story opens with Sam disrupting Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) from selling stolen Adamantium at a Mexican church where the villain has taken the clergy hostage. That Adamantium, removed from an alien structure that surfaced in the Indian Ocean, is central to a treaty that President Ross wants to sign with Japan, France, and India to provide the miraculous metal to every nation on Earth. An assassination attempt on Ross at the White House complicates this transaction, setting Sam in motion to find out what’s going on.
Most of the investigating and subterfuge and fighting leads to the film’s big third-act conflict, which the marketing has already revealed: President Ross transforms into the furious and deadly Red Hulk, and it’s going to take all of Sam’s skills to stop him from destroying Washington, D.C. (And yes, this film is as much a sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk as it is to the Captain America movies; viewers are advised at least to read the Wikipedia page for this mostly-forgotten franchise entry.)
If Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a streaming series that occasionally approached the cinematic, Brave New World too often feels like TV on the big screen, from its periodically dodgy VFX to Laura Karpman’s insistent score. That show allowed for greater insight in its portrayals of both Sam and “O.G” Super Soldier Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), but here they’re reduced to mere action figures, as are new characters Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), who has inherited the Falcon’s wings, and Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), a graduate of the Widow program who will make you miss the steely sarcasm of earlier Widows played by Scarlett Johansson and Florence Pugh. If anyone walks away with the movie, it’s Esposito, who can turn straightforward exposition and threats into Shakespeare.
There are enough writ-large thrills and spills to keep Marvel die-hards interested, and perhaps the studio’s new paradigm is that character-building only gets to happen within the real estate of six episodes. Following strikes, lockdowns, the death of one of its key performers, and at least one real-life scandal, the MCU train is back up and running, but this latest entry sees it jerking in fits and starts as it leaves the station.
