If you want to feel old, read the following sentence: It’s been 11 years since “Captain America: The Winter Solder” came out. Eleven years ago, Marvel and Disney released a film about Nazis taking over the American government. That story aged unpleasantly well. Now the year is 2025 and Marvel and Disney are making hapless and cheap-looking junk like “Captain America: Brave New World,” a film without a backbone. It’s a shamelessly pointless motion picture, one that stumbles into powerful symbolism but uses those symbols to say as little as possible. In fact, nothing is said. Which sadly says it all.
“Captain America: Brave New World” stars Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, formerly a superhero named Falcon, who took the mantle of Captain America when Steve Rogers retired. Well, technically Sam rejected the mantle at first, but he reclaimed it after the U.S. government handed the job to a blonde white guy who wasn’t qualified but was, to the U.S. government’s satisfaction, blonde and white. You can watch Sam’s character arc unfold in the TV series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” a show which was actually about something, in a sloppy sort of way.
Unfortunately Marvel couldn’t think of any other character arcs for Sam Wilson. “Captain America: Brave New World” doesn’t tell a story about Sam, it tells a story in which Sam does stuff. That’s not the same thing. He’s a government agent saving the government from a nasty threat, not much more. There are only a few scenes where Sam is emotionally connected to the plot, and in all those scenes, “Brave New World” just rehashes the better parts of “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” Briefly. And without any impact, since he’s literally done it before.
“Brave New World” opens with Sam Wilson on a mission for the U.S. government, recovering a mysterious MacGuffin that was stolen by the mercenary Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito). Sam delivers the package to the newly-elected President Thaddeus Ross, who was formerly played by the late William Hurt. He was a thorn in the Avengers’ side for years. Ross, now played by Harrison Ford (who hasn’t looked this bored since “Expendables 3”), is trying to cement his legacy with a landmark treaty involving the giant Celestial that hatched out of the Earth in Chloé Zhao’s “Eternals.”
The plot kicks into high gear — actually let’s not go nuts, it’s second gear at most — when Sam brings Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) to a White House event. Bradley was a mid-20th century American super soldier who was imprisoned by his own government, a story which deserves its own movie or TV show. Instead he’s a stray plot point in this one. He goes rogue and tries to kill President Ross, but he can’t remember doing it. If this makes “Brave New World” sound like “The Manchurian Candidate,” it sounds better than it is.
Sam and his new sidekick, another Falcon (Danny Ramirez), search for the real culprit, which leads them to a secret government facility where we find out the government secretly used a brilliant supervillain to empower themselves. Yes, that is literally one of the exact same plot points from “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” No, it’s not as effective the second time.
The conspiracy leads Captain America and Falcon to beat up lots of mind-controlled bad guys. This is a film about the U.S. government knowingly mistreating People of Color. This is a film about an emotionally unstable, untrustworthy, and probably corrupt American president. Somehow “Captain America: Brave New World” has nothing to say about either of those things. All those big ideas are just an excuse for action sequences.
And what pedestrian action sequences they are! “Captain America: Brave New World” is filmed as flatly as a movie can possibly be filmed, and it’s riddled with underwhelming visual effects, partly because of the drab visual style, and partly because they don’t always look finished. (Sam’s CGI wings frequently look like a proof of concept that proves nothing, especially when they’re in attack mode.) There’s an impressive amount of unimpressiveness in the so-called thrills of “Brave New World.”
Anthony Mackie is a great Captain America in a bad Captain America movie. He carries the weight of his character’s previous appearances, which anchors and amplifies an otherwise underwritten role. The franchise’s storied history could also have bolstered Harrison Ford’s performance, since “Brave New World” is in many ways a Thaddeus Ross movie, not a Captain America one. But it doesn’t. Ford is playing the same Thaddeus Ross on the page, but not in his portrayal, so his character’s history does little to inform the role. Ross has been an incidental MCU placeholder for years, filling the shoes of “government man” or “military man” whenever a movie needed one. Retroactively claiming he was richly characterized the whole time doesn’t hold water.
“Captain America: Brave New World” was directed by Julius Onah (“Luce”), but like lots of Marvel movies lately, it plays like it was made by a focus group. Everything looks clean, so clean it looks completely fake, and every time a daring choice could be made, the movie backs away from the daring implications. This is a film where the President of the United States literally turns red and tries to publicly murder a Black man, and yet according to “Brave New World,” the real problem is that we weren’t sympathetic enough to the dangerously corrupt rage monster. This film’s steadfast refusal to engage with its own ideas, either by artistic design or corporate mandate, reeks of timidity.
This movie ends with one of the worst post-credits sequences you’ve ever seen, a so-called “tease” that’s so little, and so very late, and filmed so half-heartedly that it’s nails-on-chalkboard annoying. Imagine if “Spider-Man: No Way Home” ended with a tease that Peter Parker will become Spider-Man someday — it’s just that redundant.
That’s “Captain America: Brave New World” for you. It’s so lackluster that there’s no luster left. There’s nothing brave about this movie. There’s nothing new either. And sure, it technically takes place in the world, but one out of three is bad.
