Captain America: Brave New World: Sputtering out on the runway.

Riot’s Reviews: Captain America: Brave New World

There is a worrying trend going on in Hollywood right now and it often is being found/reported in the MCU, ever since Avengers: Endgame brilliantly capped off a generation of films. The trend is re-shoots. In the course of filming, studios and directors are having plotlines be hindered or redirected by current events and in a worst case scenario, finding out during screenings of their final product that they have a massive dud on their hands. In regards to the MCU, re-shoots are not the worst of their problems. The push to expand content, particularly through television shows on Disney+ and writer’s inability to cohesively handle the multiverse concept, has left the MCU in disarray, struggling to keep its fandom from slipping through their fingers. I’ve often said that I don’t believe superhero fatigue is real and I once made a prediction that a few key titles could turn things around. After watching Captain America: Brave New World, I can feel both of those statements slipping through my fingers.

I like to keep my biases out in the open and returning readers will know that I have grievances (to say the least) with what they have done with The Incredible Hulk (you can see one of my impassioned rants here). The fact that I am bringing this up as a tantamount point is why this film does not work for me: a Captain America movie not about Captain America! The entire plotline of the film is shoehorning the audience back into The Incredible Hulk storyline after Marvel spent a whole generation of movies trying to pretend those events never happened! The ham-fisted plot inclusions featured in the cesspool of a story that was She Hulk did nothing to warrant their expansion into the story of Captain America. Even if you can mentally get past the recasting of General Ross (Harrison Ford), which unfortunately had to happen because of the death of William Hurt, the arrival/return of Betty (Liv Tyler) at the end makes the whole thing somehow worse. They absolutely wasted Tim Blake Nelson (Samuel Sterns/The Leader) again not only by making his prosthetics/design look so laughably appalling that you can’t take him seriously even for a second, but they also somehow made a super-intellect villain dopey and egregiously incorrect on every single move he made throughout the film. Red Hulk was a severely disappointing miss in every way. They couldn’t keep any semblance of consistency in his size (no joke, it changed with every shot), the CGI of the actor’s face into their Hulk form has progressively gotten worse somehow, and they seemingly couldn’t be bothered to maintain canon in regards to his powers. The MCU has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they cannot handle The Hulk. Please stop.

Outside of these problems, there were a plethora more to choose from. First off, I want to say that I really like Anthony Mackie and for the record, he was a perfect Falcon. But, he should not be Captain America. Before y’all get mad at me for saying that, here’s my caveat: no one should be Captain America anymore, Cap’s arc is done and I would have been more than satisfied to see it finished in Endgame. Mackie, as good of an actor as he is, has a chemistry problem and you see it in the way he interacts with people. To his credit, I blame it primarily on the s*** dialogue they give him. But even in a random appearance of Sebastian Stan (Bucky), who Mackie has worked with for an entire television show, the awkwardness was hard to ignore. Brave New World didn’t give Cap/Mackie anywhere new to go. There was no growth and it didn’t present him with any substantive issues he could overcome. If anything, the audience was just given another drawn out lecture of his “be better” (whatever the f*** that means) speech from Falcon and the Winter Soldier and an extremely shallow assessment of geopolitics and…redemption? I guess?! Brave New World had that now familiar feeling of too many cooks in the kitchen with an endless string of boring callbacks and nonsense references. For example, if you’re going to go out of the way to say the Wakandans built new wings for you, maybe use their new functions more than twice?

Captain America: Brave New World suffered badly from consistency. Even though we all know that Sam (Mackie) didn’t take the super-soldier serum (and they remind you constantly throughout) they refuse to maintain the realism behind what that would mean, especially in regards to getting in a fist fight with a Hulk. The movie had a moving target at best for a villain(s) and it absolutely wasted an actor like Giancarlo Esposito. The hand to hand combat with Sidewinder (Esposito) and Cap was shockingly some of the best action in the movie and it would’ve been nice to see that more developed. They left in a distracting character (Shira Haas) that had no payout because they were swayed by current events and wasted one of their few compelling characters in Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly). The entire thing was plagued by characters making confusing mistakes for a plot advancement that ended up feeling like a chopped up, jumbled mess, highly indicative of a movie plagued by reshoots and haphazard editing. I wouldn’t dare think that the MCU is officially dead but it might be fair to say it’s on a bit of life support. I am really interested on seeing where they’ll take the storyline of Thunderbolts* and I have very mixed feelings about The Fantastic Four: First Steps. It seems to me that the fans that are still hanging on by their fingertips are looking for a hand up, to be shown a film that is actually working toward something that’s not just an endless string of callbacks. As it stands today, the MCU feels much like that scene from Ratatouille where the customer asks “what is new” and the kitchen proceeds to lose their minds.

Riot’s Rating: 3.5/10: Remember to weigh this number against my Hulk bias. Some of the CGI was pretty great (especially the flight sequences) and there were some solid hand to hand combat scenes early on. But overall, this was a big miss for me.