Captain America: Brave New World

by Mike McGranaghan

Once upon a time, a new entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe was a virtual guarantee of entertainment. The movies were fun, faithful representations of the comic book style of storytelling. Recent years have seen the studio increasingly constructing their films around gimmicks: going into the quantum realm in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, merging the worlds of two beloved characters in Deadpool & Wolverine, and crossing over TV and cinematic franchises with The Marvels. The approach has yielded mixed results.

The latest MCU entry, Captain America: Brave New World finds Marvel with its head up its own posterior. The gimmick here is “Harrison Ford turns into the Red Hulk.” Everything in the picture is designed solely to get to that point, which is to say that the plotting is haphazard and unsatisfying.

Thaddeus Ross (Ford) is now the President of the United States. He makes peace with former adversary Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), even asking him to reunite the Avengers. What happens next is more a series of half-baked ideas than an actual story. It involves an assassination attempt, the quest to recover stolen Adamantium, a mind control plot, and Ross’s effort to establish a treaty with other countries. These elements loosely tie together, building to the only thing the movie really cares about, i.e. Harrison Ford turning into the Red Hulk, which occurs during the final thirty minutes.

In a very bizarre choice, Brave New World inextricably ties itself to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, an enjoyable movie that nevertheless was not exactly a high point in the MCU. Ford takes over for the late William Hurt, and other characters from that entry are brought back to (very) belatedly wrap up their arcs, most notably Tim Blake Nelson, who once again plays scientist Samuel Sterns. Does anyone really care what happened to that guy, or to Ross’s daughter Betty, after 17 years? Making matters worse, Sterns now takes the trophy for the stupidest looking character in the MCU, displacing M.O.D.O.K. in Quantumania.

Nothing that happens in the film is particularly interesting. The screenplay is credited to five different writers, and indeed it feels like the product of a committee. It’s often not clear how one thing ties in to another because everything is all over the place. Director Julius Onah – whose Luce is an underseen treasure – tries to create the feel of a ‘70s paranoid thriller, yet can’t get out from under the fact that the script’s entire structure is designed to build to a “make the fans lose their minds” finale. Not, mind you, a finale that provides any true emotional or intellectual satisfaction.

And how is that finale? Honestly, kind of silly. Ford is easily the picture’s high point, as he works to give Ross multiple dimensions. But since Red Hulk doesn’t arrive organically, the entire sequence has a hollow feel. This is the point where Brave New World fulfills its mission. Without a solid build-up, though, all the bashing and smashing mayhem only goes so far.

Anthony Mackie is a compelling actor who is certainly capable of carrying a big-budget action flick. You can tell he’s taking the role of Captain America seriously. The material is unfortunately nowhere near as committed as he is. A handful of passable fight scenes and a couple good performances still aren’t enough to disguise the glaringly obvious fact that the third act of Brave New World is the only part that anybody was genuinely enthusiastic to make.

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