'Captain America: Brave New World' Is Not Brave
HAVE YOU EVER seen a political thriller before? With the release of Captain America: Brave New World, Marvel seems to be hoping the answer to that question is 'no.' Despite the fact that the studio has succeeded in the genre before—with 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier, one of the best movies it's ever put out—its latest effort is an entry that decidedly does not. It's a conspiracy thriller with no one to be suspicious of, because the movie barely establishes a list of characters one could possibly suspect. It's a political thriller with nothing to grapple with. It wants to be a lot of things, but very little of it comes together in the end.
Marvel has been in a rough patch; it's been a while since the studio actually put a movie out that was contributing to its post-Avengers: Endgame storyline (what little there has been of one). 2024's only big screen release for the colossal franchise was Deadpool & Wolverine, a silly movie that grossed more than $1 billion, but only scarcely-at-best connected to the larger story. Outside of that, we have to go all the way back to November 2023's The Marvels, a fine movie that grossly underperformed at the box office.
Which is to say: Marvel needed a win. The Winter Soldier mashed up Marvel lore with the political thriller vibe that audiences saw before in classics like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor (and even got the latter film's star, Robert Redford, to come along for the ride). Marvel thought Captain America: Brave New World, the fourth film in its Captain America sub-franchise, would be a perfect way to recapture that energy, and with the legendary Harrison Ford on board to play newly-elected President Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (taking over the role from the late William Hurt, who died in 2022), it seemed well on its way.
Except Brave New World doesn't work. It's not for lack of trying; Ford, along with Anthony Mackie (who takes over the titular role after a decade already in the MCU) and Danny Ramirez are all doing their best to have a good time in a movie that desperately needed to balance good tension and solid fun. But a sloppy script consistently lets them down.
There's not too much plot to get into: after being elected President off-screen, Ross, who claims to have changed from his war mongering days (much of this movie, for some reason, operates as a sequel to 2008's The Incredible Hulk), wants to work more closely on missions with Sam Wilson (Mackie), the new Captain America. But when an assassination attempt comes to fruition, a conspiracy is unleashed.
This is a reasonable start. But the movie has no idea how to follow that thread, not realising that the mystery and tension of movies like The Parallax View and even The Winter Soldier is what made them so good and so enjoyable.
The biggest issue with the film is that everything important was given away long ago. The entire marketing campaign for Brave New World was centred on the character of "Red Hulk," who Ross eventually transforms into; this doesn't happen until the final stretch of the movie, and it only happens for one sequence—the one you've seen in all the trailers, and all the commercials. The Marvel of the past—a more confident Marvel—would have saved this development to be a surprise in the theatre, and perhaps it would've played better. Instead, everyone knows it's coming, and by the time it arrives, it's anti-climactic. Where does the tension come from when you're teasing something that you instead used to get people in the door?
There's a similar issue with the film's primary villain, a "buyer" of a deadly weapon, whose identity is played as a mystery for more than half of the film. The issue, of course, is that the movie once again is playing up intrigue around something that was already publicly revealed. If you, luckily, did not know this person was in the movie, we won't add to the chorus here. But it comes down to Marvel lacking confidence in its product, and wanting to show fans up front what's in the movie—even if it means taking away from the ultimate viewing experience. And this villain himself, while played by a great actor, is underwritten and thus entirely forgettable.
That's only one part of the issue. Marvel scripts are frequently worked-over, rewritten numerous times as the movies try to fit into certain boxes, and work in certain ways. That's never more evident than here, as Mackie, Ramirez, and Ford are stuck speaking lines of pure exposition and corny platitudes. There's no subtlety to anything: it's like they need to say what they're doing, and announce what they're feeling, or else it doesn't exist.
All should not be doomed for the MCU, though. Captain America: Brave New World is not very good, and is not really successful in its mission of being another MCU political thriller. But at least it does set up a future on the big screen that will be followed-through on; finally we get teases for future movies and plotlines that we know will actually be picked up on. This hardly makes this movie better, but the continuity is something that helped the pre-Endgame MCU to its major success, and that has been sorely missing with so many random, disconnected, and not followed-up on teases throughout the last five years. You just have to worry that the investment in the plotline being set up here does not carry anywhere near the same weight that the looming threat of Thanos did for Marvel's original golden run.
I remain confident in Thunderbolts and Fantastic Four, Marvel's movies due out this summer; that doesn't change with the fact that Brave New World fell short. But the pressure on those two films to be good, and now make people forget about how underwhelming this one ultimately was, is mounting.
But maybe that's how Brave New World will play into their strengths. I saw the movie a day ago, and despite the flaws, I'm not festering with it, angry about it, or even really sitting with it—I'm just forgetting about it. And at the end of the day, that may be what Marvel wants everyone to do.
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Watch Three Days of the Condor Here
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