Captain America: Brave New World isn’t anti-Trump, but it’s certainly anti-fun
The product of three different release dates, five screenwriters and six months of reshoots – plus a mid-production title change – Captain America: Brave New World clobbers into cinemas bearing the dents and scrapes you’d expect. This is the 35th film in a Marvel saga that’s lost its way in recent years. Will there be a creative turnaround anytime soon? It’s not likely, based on the material here. Brave New World is stuffed with callbacks to movies everyone seemed to agree were misfires upon release – among them Chloe Zhao’s dismal 2021 space oddity Eternals and the Edward Norton-starring The Incredible Hulk from 2008. It leaves the film not so much a reshuffling of the deck as a journey to nowhere, like switching rooms on the Titanic.
Our hero is Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, who assumed the Captain America mantle after Chris Evans turned in his shield in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. Invited to the White House by President Thaddeus Ross (a blandly stern Harrison Ford), he’s embroiled in a conspiracy when Ross is nearly assassinated during a speech. Wilson eventually realises – though long after it becomes patently obvious where all of this is headed – that someone is using mind control to disrupt Ross’s plans to share between nations an alien metal alloy that’s just been discovered in the Indian Ocean.
So far, so Manchurian Candidate. Albeit with ETs, I suppose. The film is fitfully interesting in its early stages, with director Julius Onah staging suspenseful foot-chases across Washington DC, and characters taken out with ruthless efficiency. But the plot quickly nosedives, with Wilson and his grating sidekick Torres (Danny Ramirez) travelling from mysterious lair to mysterious lair, picking up clues where they can. The secret principal villain is never more than a cipher, while the late-stage transformation of Ross into a crimson spin on Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk – ostensibly a plot twist, despite being the focus of the movie’s promotional campaign – is marred by poor CGI.
Character development is, overall, an afterthought. Mackie, a fine actor who at this point has been stuck in these movies for far too long, gets little to play with – a single, solitary scene, complete with an unbilled surprise guest star, explores Wilson’s feelings of imposter syndrome. Beyond that, he’s a functional, blandly heroic punching machine.
The same feeling of frictionless aridity plagues every other aspect of the film. Brave New World has been embroiled in controversy since it started production, first due to its inclusion of an Israeli Marvel hero named Sabra – who, in the comics, trained in the IDF – and then due to rumours of anti-Trump allusions running through the film’s script. Backlash only grew in right-wing circles last month when Mackie was accused of underselling his character’s patriotism in an interview. With Disney being particularly skittish of late when it comes to conservative boycotts, Mackie quickly apologised, reiterating his pride in being an American on his Instagram.
But this is far more hand-wringing than such an uneventful film deserves. Sabra arrives in the form of Shira Haas’s Ruth Bat-Seraph, whose country of birth is mentioned once but is otherwise such a non-entity in the movie that she may as well have been born on Mars. And I suppose you could read a red-skinned and angry US president as a Trump pastiche, but it’s a stretch. In fact, Brave New World repeatedly seems to scurry away from any kind of political stance – one particular subplot involving warring heads of state is wrapped up in a single line of dialogue right before the end credits, and an early accusation that Wilson is toadying up to Ross, a man with a laundry list of dodgy dealings to his name, goes nowhere.
I suppose it’s a victory of sorts that Brave New World isn’t the catastrophe that its endless delays and reshoots might have suggested. But in the wake of Eternals, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels – otherwise known as three different shades of slop – the MCU cannot afford to rest on producing merely functional entertainment anymore. Remember when these movies used to dazzle?
Dir: Julius Onah. Starring: Anthony Mackie, Harrison Ford, Danny Ramirez, Shira Haas, Giancarlo Esposito, Tim Blake Nelson, Carl Lumbly. 12A, 118 minutes.
‘Captain America: Brave New World’ is in cinemas from 14 February
