Captain America: Brave New World

 

After being elected President of the United States, former general Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford, replacing the late William Hurt) pushes for an international treaty that would prevent an arms race and allow for shared extraction of adamantium, an advanced extraterrestrial metal. He also seeks the help of Captain America, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) to re-form the Avengers, a superhero group Ross once opposed. Wilson is skeptical, but when a series of coordinated attacks jeopardize Ross’s plans and threaten to trigger a war, Cap and his protégé Joaquin “Falcon” Torres (Danny Ramirez) vow to get to the bottom of it before someone they care about takes the fall.

 

The standard knock on Marvel movies these days is that they’ve become too insular, too creatively sterile, and too dependent on quippy dialogue and slick CGI to do more than briefly (or, in the case of runtime bloat, not-so-briefly) entertain. Truth be told, Brave New World, the fourth Captain America film (though the first to star Mackie in the role), won’t do much to challenge those perceptions. And yet to call it “bad” wouldn’t really be fair. Even after reshoots and delays, no one should confuse this with a Zack Snyder film butchered by meddling executives or a Fant4stic doomed by directorial incompetence. The worst that can be said about Brave New World is that it is neither brave nor new, playing as a muted version of what Marvel previously did much better in projects like Captain America: The Winter Soldier and even The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

 

The one unblemished bright spot is the addition of Ford, a controversial choice given that other Marvel characters (cough T’Challa cough) were not recast when the actor died. Hurt’s version went from Ahabesque Hulk hunter to obstructive politician, never the worst person the heroes had to face but a consistently unpleasant jerk nevertheless. Ford’s version keeps the character’s rough edges (stubbornness, selfishness, and pride) but adds a layer of melancholic regret. He’s believable as a man who knows he’s caused a lot of damage (alienating his daughter in the process) and is trying to do better.

 

Everyone else is solid even though they aren’t given enough to work with. Mackie is a good fit for the title role, yet he doesn’t have the room to spread his acting wings that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier afforded him. He sometimes seems sidelined in what is nominally his movie. Giancarlo Esposito has made menacing villains his stock and trade as of late, and he appears briefly as terrorist leader Sidewinder here. He supplies a physical threat, but the character isn’t particularly memorable. More distinction was granted to Tim Blake Nelson’s mad scientist Samuel Sterns, last seen getting infected by gamma-radiated blood way back in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. Nelson’s creepy calm tilts the character away from garden-variety megalomania, but Sterns comes across petty, and the character design does him no favors. Shira Haas as national security advisor Ruth Bat-Seraph had the potential to bring something interesting to the mix, but instead of the comics’ Israeli superheroine, she’s depicted as an ex-Black Widow: still formidable but a type of character we’ve seen several times before.

 

“We’ve seen this before” applies to the feel of several of the film’s action set pieces as well, be they aerial battles or Captain America going hand-to-hand against a tough mercenary. That said, the pacing is brisk without being rushed. What Julius Onah’s direction lacks in distinction it makes up for in competence. The visual effects, derided by some critics, aren’t really poor.

 

Malcolm Spellman, who created The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, was one of Brave New World’s co-writers though you wouldn’t really know it. Whereas the show was guilty of occasional grandstanding, it wasn’t afraid to engage complex issues. This movie gives a nod to the power of representation before breezily zipping along to the next plot point. It’s enough for some – and too much for racist idiots — but it will leave others wondering what a bolder version of this movie might have been.