Midway through Captain America: Brave New World, Sam Wilson and Joaquin Torres break into the home base of Samuel Sterns, the gamma-irradiated baddie known as the Leader. After an impressive-looking establishing shot that features a pair of red-hued satellite dishes, a close-up catches the heroes charging the bunker door. The pair frantically pry the door open and slide inside. One last shot outside the door catches two guards passing by, suggesting that our heroes just evaded capture.
The sequence will annoy anyone who thinks about it for more than two seconds. Where did the guards come from? Why didn’t we see them earlier? How close were Sam and Joaquin from being caught?
It’s a testament to the propulsive pace of Captain America: Brave New World‘s first two-thirds that those questions never come up. In its best moments, Brave New World feels cheap and lean, like a thriller you’d watch Sunday afternoon on TNT in the 1990s. Disney, who spent $180 million across the movie’s troubled production, probably doesn’t want to hear that, but the cheap quality works in the favor of Brave New World. It lacks the bloated, overdone feel of too many Marvel movies, and instead powers through the many plot hiccups and clunky exchanges, entertaining viewers along the way.
This isn’t to say that Brave New World doesn’t have a lot going on. Directed by Julius Onah and written by a bunch of credited people, Captain America: Brave New World stars Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson, who steps into the role of Captain America just as his old rival Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford) takes the presidency. Desperate to erase his warmonger reputation, Ross attempts to reconcile with Sam, going so far as to ask him to reform the Avengers and inviting mistreated former super-soldier Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) to a White House meeting.
Things go awry when Bradley suddenly tries to assassinate Ross, sending Sam and his sidekick Torres aka the Falcon (Danny Ramirez) on a winding trail that involves a mercenary group called Serpent, led by Giancarlo Esposito’s Sidewinder, Ross’s Black Widow-trained new aide Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), and eventually Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), back for revenge after the events of The Incredible Hulk (2008).
Is the plot clean? No, not at all. Brave New World has been in production since 2021, and has gone through many permutations, abandoning its ill-advised original title New World Order, removing entire plotlines (including one involving wrestler Seth Rollins), cutting out Bat-Seraph’s background as a mutant Mossad agent, and adding Esposito just a few months ago. Furthermore, Brave New World is filled with references to Marvel’s past, The Incredible Hulk and Captain America: Civil War in particular, and to its future, as the super-metal associated with Wolverine of the X-Men drives the plot.
Rather than belabor its problems, Brave New World blasts right through them with a can-do attitude that can’t help but win viewers over. The fight scenes are genuinely impressive, with Sam’s shield/wing combination leading to fun new variations. The cinematography by Kramer Morgenthau often looks beautiful, making the most of striking locations, including an underground lab and a battleship bridge. An aerial battle that pits Cap and Falcon against a bevy of fighter jets feels new to the MCU, especially because it veers closer to the original Top Gun than Top Gun: Maverick.
That old-school, pre-MCU feel begins with Mackie’s performance as Sam Wilson. Where Mackie brought a laidback, supportive quality to Sam’s previous outings, his stiff take here makes his fight scene one-liners sing. Interactions with Joaquin don’t lighten things up, as Ramirez plays Torres too goofy and laidback, and the two actors never establish a believable rapport. However, whenever Sam’s butting heads with President Ross or staring down Sterns, his furrowed brow and stiff upper lip work in a direct-to-video way.
As much as his press tour playfulness suggested that he might continue his late-career run of surprisingly dialed-in blockbuster performances, Ford never quite clicks into the role of Ross. Much of the blame probably belongs to a script that tries to recover emotional beats from The Incredible Hulk, a bad movie almost 20-years-old in which the late William Hurt portrayed Ross. Ford never finds the right emotional grounding for Ross’s regret. But when he starts getting mad and barking orders, Ford finds that old gruff charm once again.
Instead, Brave New World‘s best performance comes from Lumbly as Isaiah Bradley, the former super soldier we first met in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Lumbly holds together the tragedy of his character, a Black test subject who was rewarded for his successful missions in Korea with a prison sentence from his government. After becoming a brainwashed would-be assassin, Lumbly makes sure we understand that it’s the threat of being jailed again that terrifies him, not that he has failed a country that did nothing for him. Lumbly relates those complex emotions through his incredible face, which Morgenthau uses at every chance. A shot of Bradley in prison uses under lighting to capture every rich line on Lumbley’s expression, indicating sorrow and anger and desperate strength, all at once.
Between Lumbly’s soul, Mackie’s determination, and Ford’s star power, Brave New World overcomes every problem. Almost.
The film’s final act slows things down to the point that all the previous problems catch up to it, and sends Sam crashing to the ground. It’s hard to say what, exactly, is the biggest issue with the ending. Is it the fact that trailers and commercials have already shown everything about Ross’s Red Hulk transformation? Is it the unearned emotional moments hammered into the end? Is it the worst visuals in any Marvel movie ever, a smudgy pink and green mess that seems to transform Sam and Red Hulk to the Oz of Wicked?
Who can say? And it doesn’t really matter. Brave New World gave us 90-minutes of cheap thrills, the type of fun the MCU threatened to erase from existence. If Sam crash lands at the end, it’s all the more impressive that he kept this mess in the air for so long.
Captain America: Brave New World flies into theaters on Feb. 14. Learn more about Den of Geek’s review process and why you can trust our recommendations here.
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