If there's one virtue Disney can't seem quite able to learn it's restraint. Whether it's the Star Wars franchise, their live-action remakes or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the media conglomerate seems hell bent on pumping out mediocre content until even the most stalwart fans are buckling from over-exposure and exhaustion. (The Acolyte? Lightyear? Pinocchio? Who is watching these?)
Nowhere has that fatigue been more apparent than in the MCU though. After six films in the franchise's golden Phase Three cleared a billion dollars globally, only two of the 12 films in Phases Four or Five have managed hit that mark. Similarly only two of the films in Phases One through Three landed below 70% on Rotten Tomatoes while nearly half of the subsequent movies fell below that mark. That Marvel fatigue certainly isn't helped by the dozen TV shows they've dumped onto Disney+ since 2021 in an attempt to drag fans to the streaming site. Of Marvel's recent disappointments, however, none is quite so heinous as Captain America: Brave New World.
While previous Marvel duds have suffered from being too wacky (The Marvels), too convoluted (Eternals), too entrenched in setup (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania) or just forgettable (Thor: Love and Thunder), Brave New World is somehow afflicted with all these ailments and then some. It's a movie so disastrously and confoundingly bad it's hard to fathom how Kevin Feige and co. managed to cram so many errors into 118 minutes.
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Captain America: Brave New WorldMarvel/Disney
Perhaps the most obvious flaw (and one becoming increasingly common in the MCU) is it's reliance on viewers having an intimate understanding of Marvel canon. Brave New World pulls central plot points from 2008's The Incredible Hulk, a movie so old that Bruce Banner was played not by Mark Ruffalo but by Edward Norton. One of Banner's antagonists in that film was U.S. Army general Thaddeus Ross, played at the time by William Hurt. Nearly 20 years later, Ross (now played by Harrison Ford) is the newly elected president of the United States.
In an overly complicated (and extremely boring) plot, Ross invites the newly minted Captain America, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) to the White House to ask Wilson to re-start the Avengers. An assassination attempt derails the event as well a a treaty with Japan related to a new metal discovered in that giant stone head thing that popped out of the ocean in Eternals. Also involved is a criminal organization run by Giancarlo Esposito, an ex-Black Widow moonlighting as Ross's security advisor (played by Shira Haas), Tim Blake Nelson's mutated biologist (also from The Incredible Hulk) and a super soldier from the Korean War who is being mind controlled (Carl Lumbly). If you haven't seen The Incredible Hulk, Eternals and the TV show The Falcon and the Winter Soldier recently, not to mention the previous Captain America installments, you'll likely be confused.
The issue with having so much lore is that it becomes near impossible to decipher what's a callback to a previous MCU property and what's new. I spent the entire movie assuming that Esposito's Sidewinder had been grafted in from one of the TV shows, only to learn he's a completely new character. Meanwhile despite having seen The Incredible Hulk (as a teenager), I had no recollection of Nelson's Samuel Sterns. You end up spending half the movie leaning over to your friend asking, "Was he in something else?"
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Harrison Ford as Red Hulk in Captain America Brave New WorldDisney/Marvel
While all the references to past films/setup for future ones certainly weigh down most MCU entries, the script for Brave New World is particularly heinous. The film credits five screenwriters (including director Julius Onah), but the WGA lists another four as contributing "additional literary material." The nine-man team produced some of the MCU's clunkiest dialogue and least interesting action sequences. The opening scuffle in Oaxaca is tame by Marvel standards, and really only the Japanese maritime battle offers anything exciting.
Perhaps due in part to the exposition and platitude-laced dialogue, Mackie really fails to shine as Captain America and without cool fight scenes or much of an emotional arch in the movie, he becomes quite forgettable. Moreover, Ford gives off the impression that he was being held hostage on the Atlanta soundstage, mumbling his way through a performance more wooden than Groot. The sole bright spot in the cast is Danny Ramirez as the new Falcon, but he's largely absent from the back half of the film.
In Falcon's place, viewers are offered a final showdown between Captain America and Ford's Red Hulk. The Red Hulk reveal is held until the last possible minute in the movie, but was used repeatedly in Brave New World's advertising, which makes the final transformation anticlimactic. The springtime, cherry blossom-filled Washington D.C. battle, is jam packed with Marvel's, now infamous, cheap CGI. The final scenes are so bad, people in my theater laughed at a wide shot of the Potomac River, which looks like it had been animated with the same tech as the original Shrek.
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Captain America: Brave New WorldMarvel/Disney
With Phase Five continuing to disappoint, the MCU will pivot into Phase Six in July with the arrival of The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Fans and critics alike seem to be growing weary of the MCU projects and that will make assembling a team of compelling Avengers much more difficult. Perhaps Marvel would be best to leave the decades worth of lore behind in favor of a fresh start, but Disney will most certainly refuse that option.
Instead we're likely to get more dumpster fires like Brave New World. It doesn't take the percentage calculating mind of Samuel Sterns to forecast that this will go down in history as one of the MCU's worst.
Grade: D
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