Review by C.J. Bunce
For all the ideas spun around in Captain America: Brave New World, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest entry streaming on Disney+, the script suffers from the same problem of many Marvel and DC movies: With a fully fleshed out fantasy world of superheroes so well established, the idea of showcasing a single superhero who must save the world from its latest threat seems goofy. When Harrison Ford’s President Ross turns full Red Hulk, where are the rest of the MCU slate of superheroes to help? Add in the fact that viewers need to go back to a pair of lackluster movies before the MCU was established to really know what’s happening and you have a movie that fails in its potential to give Sam Wilson his chance to shine in his own Captain America movie.
Even the actors can’t hide that the script is shoehorning a lot into the opening scenes. Harrison Ford has replaced the late William Hurt, who played General Ross since 2008’s Hulk, who had replaced Sam Elliott, the actor who began the role in 2003’s The Incredible Hulk. Ford tries to massage the change into the story for the audience, remarking about his new look sans moustache and telegraphing the long history of the character by bringing up daughter Betty numerous times throughout the movie, originally played by Jennifer Connelly, then by Liv Tyler in Hulk. Tyler reprises her role here, but only briefly. So we quickly learn this is going to be a story about Ross as much as Captain America.
Captain America’s story is a play on The Manchurian Candidate, an interesting choice that makes good use of a character from the last time we saw Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier limited series. It’s not played out enough for that to be much of a spoiler, but it has Sam revisit his relationship with long-time friend and mentor Isaiah Bradley, played again with gravitas by Carl Lumley. This requires the movie-going (or home streaming) audience to have watched the TV series, where viewers learned Bradley was also a super-soldier, a victim of the same serum Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers took voluntarily to gain his super-human strength and powers in World War II.
The villains bounce around. At times it’s Ford’s President Ross. At times it’s Giancarlo Esposito, wasted as a mercenary called Sidewinder, who has no relation to the character in the comics. At times it’s the guy who hired Sidewinder, Tim Blake Nelson’s Samuel Sterns aka The Leader, a character that doesn’t make any sense unless you remember the details of The Incredible Hulk movie in 2008. Nelson is also wasted as this character, one of those ugly designed D-level supervillains from the comics who belongs in the legion of boring villains with the likes of Peter Sarsgaard’s Hector Hammond in Green Lantern and Guy Pearce’s Aldrich Killian in Iron Man 3. The short version is Sterns was wronged by Ross back in 2008 and he’s back for revenge.
Suddenly Bradley, and soon others, have their minds taken over by the Leader, who Sam tries to track down with his trusty sidekick Joaquin Torres, played again by Danny Ramirez. Mackie and Ramirez are a great pair, but much of what could have been a fun dynamic duo is bogged down with too many uber-comic bookish fight scenes–scenes that sometimes work in the comics for the younger set, but draw yawns and amount to filler in the movie context. No other characters from the TV series show up except a forgettable cameo from Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes. Shira Haas plays an agent who reports directly to the president who seems an odd fit.
The high point is Ford in the second half of the movie, and you can see the evolution of CGI when you compare the 2003 and 2008 Hulk to Ford’s Hulk. We last saw the green Hulk look as good at the end of Infinity War saga, and Ford’s facial features come through loud and clear. It’s too bad Marvel didn’t put forth a similar effort for the She-Hulk, Attorney-at-Law TV series. Had this story been as fun as something like the Thor vs. Hulk movie Thor: Ragnarok, the CGI would be something to remember later.
The movie has one post-credits scene that adds nothing to the wider MCU story. The absence of any of the original Avengers is glaring. Where is Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange, Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk, Tatiany Maslany’s She-Hulk, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, or any of the X-Men during the events of this movie? Diehard MCU may be here for the longhaul, but passing fans are going to drift away at some point unless the stories capture some of that magic of the comics again.
Arriving as just another entry in a string of disappointing, ho-hum Marvel movies, Captain America: Brave New World is now streaming on Disney+.
