Review 741: Captain America: Brave New World

 

Like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the Disney+ show that proceeded it, Captain America: Brave New World wants to be a commentary on why a Black man would want to represent a country should be as opposed to what it is and how we should strive to be better. It’s a surprisingly toothless affair.

After meeting with newly elected U.S. President Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (Harrison Ford), the newly  Captain America, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) finds himself in the middle of an international incident. He must discover the reason behind a nefarious global plot before the true mastermind has the entire world seeing red.

Let me pose you a question: What is a longtime MCU fan supposed to do when confronted with Captain America: Brave New World? Is it at all possible to forget Chris Evans as Steve Rogers/Captain America? I doubt it. His best Captain America films did wonderfully what could not be done in any other MCU films. Captain America is not character, he is a mantle. Other characters have doned the stars and stripes before in the comics like William Nasland, Isaiah Bradley, John Walker and Jeffrey Mace, but what's the point? The character isn't mightier than the shield as Batman, Superman or James Bond are.

The screenplay by The Falcon and the Winter Soldier showrunner Malcolm Spellman and co-writer Dalan Musson along with a bunch of other writers who's names will go unnamed feels like a hodgepodge of random ideas and leftover scraps from MCU films long past: Tiamut: The Celestial Island from The Eternals, the return of the Leader from The Incredible Hulk giving the film almost no sense of cohesion. It also serves as a wrap-up of loose MCU plot threads that nobody needed answering. I just understand the idea of Sam taking on Hulk villains like Red Hulk and the Leader. One of the core themes of Sam dealing with how others view him as Captain America feels like a retread of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier which, once again, shows the flaw of Marvel continuing plot points from Disney+ shows that not everybody watches. Apparently, Sam has been Captain America for two years since the events of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Are you really telling me that he hasn't grown into his role as Captain America since the events of that show because that’s just more than a little implausible. It also skims over other potentially interesting moral dilemmas and character conflicts such as Sam doing business with President Ross

We discover early in the film that the package that Sam and Torres retrieved at the beginning of the film is Adamantium (comic book fans will recognised that as the stuff that Wolverine's claws are made of). Spoiler alert: It never goes anywhere, it has about as much relevance as the briefcase from Pulp Fiction.

Director Julius Onah's direction is uninspired; doing a kind of efficient but flat and impersonal job of  between toothless action scenes that like an bite ranging from hand-to-hand combat scenes that we have seen a billion times in better crafted films of the genre this film wants to emulate and corny dialogue which ranges from cheesy one lines and cliched action lines. Only those with no knowledge whatsoever of the Steve Rogers Captain America trilogy or The Bourne Trilogy will find this exciting.                          The pacing is erratic, the film flies by at an almost cartoonishly fast pace almost never giving the characters a chance to breath or reflect.                                                                                                     Laura Karpman who previously composed the scores for Marvel's What If...? animated anthology series, Ms. Marvel as well as The Marvels and who was recently nominated an Oscar for the hilarious satire American Fiction starring Jeffrey Wright composed the score for this film, but you'd never notice here as most of the music is generic droning sounds. 

The cinematography is lacklustre: Captain America: Brave New World is shot in such a flat, mundane way that    The stunts are effective but that’s all they are, effective. There's no sense of awe or the viseral grit    Almost as a casualty of the films reshoots, the film features two climaxes. The first off which involves Sam and Joaquin trying to prevent a war between the U.S. and Japan over the waters near Tiamut; the dogfights are surprisingly lifeless as though the actors and the 

All culminating in a showdown between Sam and Red Hulk in the Cherry Blossoms of Washington DC that feels like Donald Trump’s wet dream and feels like pandering to fans who’ve wanted to see Red Hulk on the big screen for years.  

Anthony Mackie is a charismatic actor with a very watchable screen presence    Sam has to negotiate what being Captain America means. What course of action he's going to take, how he's going to relate to other people. How he's going to use the power that this platform gives him. Sam is a soldier first and foremost. He's a counsellor of soldiers, a leader of men. He's an understander of circumstances that he's placed in. He's not the sort of guy to punch his way out of a situation, he's a thinker but the screenplay almost never gives him a chance to display the emotional intelligence that made so likeable in previous entries. I'm amazed that they took such an interesting character like Sam Wilson and the idea of a Black Captain America and did so little with them.

Danny Ramirez is also back playing Joaquin Torres from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. In Brave New World, we see Torres take on the mantle of Falcon from Sam and we see him (or at least the film attempts to showcase him) becoming Falcon from two different angles: What does it mean to come into his own in terms of his values an pov as a person and how does he navigate that as a hero. Ostensibly, dealing with a set of complex and contradictory circumstances and he looks up to Sam as somebody who has been able to navigate that in a way that he hasn't. Sam and Joaquin have a big brother/little brother dynamic but it's never given the time or attention that it needs to be explored in any real depth. He quips and acts like a hyperactive kid so much, it’s impossible to take him seriously.

Both are men of colour (Sam being Black and Joaquin being Mexican) who've charted a very unique journey of being in the military and then becoming heroes and having this very unique platform and what that means and trying to define that.

Carl Lumbly is given practically nothing to do in a thankless role in returning as Isaiah Bradley also from The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Isaiah has come from a place of disconnection to a place of connection: In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, he was hiding out and Sam brought him into the public eye and gave him his due by having the U.S. government recognise him for his efforts. So he's back in the world in a way that he did not expect and is proud to be. He is so proud of Sam being Captain America, for him Sam represents a Captain America for the America that exists now by actually adressing the promise and capturing it and running with it so Isaiah couldn't be more prouder. Sam comes from a younger generation that doesn't have the same shakles that Isaiah did and Isaiah has has had to live through a few shakles. Understandably, he can’t understand why Sam would be willing to cooperate with Ross, a man who’s made several controversial decisions and may not have everyone’s best interests at heart. For such a rich character, he was purely a plot device meant to spure on Sam for his journey in the film and that was the beginning and end of his character. 

Shira Haas and Xosha Roquemore from The Mindy Project also appear in the film playing Leila Taylor and Ruth Bat-Seraph. Neither made a particularly big impression   In the comics, Seraph is a superman Mossad agent opperating under the codename "Sebra". However due to certain real world issues involving Isreal which will go unmentioned, she's now a Black Widow agent. But even then that's not particularly interesting considering we've already seen two of them already: Natasha and Yelena and a would-be rivalry with Sam where they initially at odds with each other but eventually come to respect each other didn't help.  

Giancarlo Esposito is wasted playing Seth Voelker/Sidewinder, who only appears in 3 scenes and was very clearly added during the films reshoots and feels like an afterthought blending in with the rest of these thin characters.

Sebsastian Stan and Liv Tyler are mearly cameos in this film reprising their roles are Bucky Barnes and Betty Ross. Stan is a particularly egrigeious example after being a prominant character throughout the Steve Rogers trilogy to just be sidelined      

I honestly think that Samuel Sterns/Leader might be one of the worst MCU villains featuring Tim Blake Nelson in a truly dreadful performance uttering teeth clenching bad dialogue and a motivation amounting to the cliched "I want revenge for being put away." The way he pulls the strings in increasingly implausible and nonsensical ways makes him come across as a discount Zemo from Civil War. One of his abilities is to predict what will happen by calculating the statistical odds of things. How are we supposed to take him seriously as a threat when Doctor Strange was able to see millions of possible futures?

Harrison Ford is an immensely charismatic actor with an incredible ability to command the room a Ross and Sam have a tense relationship. I honestly can’t see how they can justify keeping this guy around after all of his blunders 

For a blockbuster film with the word “Brave” in the title, there’s very little about Captain America: Brave New World that’s actually bold, 1.5/5.