I’ve been feeling rather checked out of the MCU for a while now with the whole franchise starting to feel like diminishing returns. The once-iconic cinematic universe feels so polluted by seemingly endless streaming shows and mediocre movies that it’s getting hard to remember what made it so great in the first place.
Captain America: Brave New World sees Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) as Captain America in his first feature film outing since receiving the shield from Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) in Avengers: Endgame. He’s a non-superpowered hero struggling with his place in the world as a Black man who has become the symbol of a country that has a cruel history with people of color.
Of course, we saw all this play out in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier series, which made an attempt—albeit a rather feeble one—at commenting on these larger themes.
In Brave New World, the themes are a jumbled mess of noncommittal babble, the action lacks any style, the characters feel paper thin, and we’re left with one of the most disappointing Marvel films to date, a talent-wasting film that falls short in pretty much every conceivable way.
The dialogue is where the problems are the most obvious. Lines like “It doesn’t matter if Ross is the president, we get to be guests at the White House” stand out as particularly cringe-worthy and only showcase how much this movie lacks any type of message. I thought the “good and bad on both sides” nonsense in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier felt weak, but this takes it to another level, refusing to be about anything at all.
It’s most obvious in the way this movie deals with Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly). Bradley was introduced to us in the series as the first Captain America, a black serviceman who was experimented on and discarded by the U.S. government during the time of segregation.
He’s a character with immense potential who is basically relegated to a Zoolander-esque plot device in Brave New World. Imagine if they had expanded on the implications of everything he went through while the world adjusts to having a Black Captain America—but they did it in a main entry film rather than a streaming series. It could have provided depth and emotion to a narrative that sorely needed it.
Brave New World desperately tries to echo the stakes and tension of The Winter Soldier and Civil War, but the writing collapses under that ambition, failing spectacularly at every turn, something even more frustrating when we look at the cast.
Mackie does his best to elevate the lackluster script, but even his committed performance can’t save it. Giancarlo Esposito, an actor we know has talent, is completely wasted in a role filled with cliché villain dialogue. Tim Blake Nelson seems to exist solely to set up sequels. Harrison Ford has never been an actor to phone it in, which is admirable considering this is clearly a paycheck decision for him, but there is just no reason to give a shit about any character in this movie. The stakes are nonexistent here, making it feel like a soulless video game let’s play.
Instead of bringing anything new or interesting to the MCU, Brave New World gives us more of the same decline we saw in movies like Quantumania or Love and Thunder, and it left me wondering if it’s finally time to call it quits and opt out of this behemoth franchise moving forward.