I'd Like to make a Brave New World Order, please
Captain America Brave New World
This important film in Marvel's efforts to keep the cinematic superhero genre alive and profitable for 2025 is a conflicted movie. It has strong, fully committed performances from Carl Lumbly and Harrison Ford, and features Anthony Mackie as a fighting Captain America. However, it struggles to give Mackie enough space to anchor this film that has a hole right through the middle of it.
A big part of that hole is that the villain of the story (Tim Blake Nelson as madman genius Samuel Sterns) is so weakly written and the fungus-head makeup made the audience I saw the film with (a packed audience in Virginia) bust out laughing. Villains are usually required to form an antagonistic dynamic with the hero and the battle of wits between them draws to the fore the contrast between the two of them and fleshes them out at the same time. That's not the case in Captain America Brave New World because the villain Sterns isn't really explored much at all, and neither is the Captain.
Hey AI, show me an image of a happy Captain America Fan seeing the box office news for President's Weekend. – More of those images
A good portion of the story takes place in Washington DC, and we see the usual movie gimcracks of this iconic city shown to us as monuments (and cherry trees) and filled with the secret service wearing sunglasses. Marvel (and Sony) have had an annoying way of presenting well-known locations in their movies as not much more than postcard images and I suppose that is directly linked to these films being shot on sound stages with green screens.
We don't get any glimpse of the new Captain America's life in this postcard city: does he feed gold fish back at his apartment? Does he change his clothes and take showers in between battles? Does he have a landlord, neighbors, a neighborhood?* Are there any friends or girls he is interested in outside of the people surrounding his high-pressure missions he is constantly taking on? There's nothing provided in this area – but on the other hand, Harrison Ford as President Ross is provided with some family life and a number of personal dilemmas inside that family. He is also caught up eventually in one of the main plot mechanism in which the villain is manipulating people through an audio tone and a flashing light that makes them mind-controlled zombies (and this seems like a straight lift out of the 1962 The Manchurian Candidate movie, and is not done better).
Harrison Ford is fine and his transformation into Red Hulk and the rampage that follows is a major part of the film, but it sucks more focus from our titular hero and there's not a lot here for Captain America except a continuous bruising-and-increasingly-difficult series of fights. If Marvel felt like Mackie had to prove his Captain America "can fight all day" just like the Steve Rogers' Captain America, they accomplished that and it doesn't hurt the movie at all (on the other hand they don't really give us the other half of the Steve Rogers paradigm: he's a superhero in ethics, too)**.
But the lack of balance on the character outside of the fighting and some dialogue exchanges that picks up from TV series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier we're given a movie that is a weird hybrid: it is both a sequel to that TV show and a sequel to the 2008 Hulk movie (and probably The Eternals, which I haven't seen) and there's just not enough space for all of this to be done in a satisfactory way. Though Captain America doesn't feel like a guest-star in his own movie, it does get dangerously close to going in that direction with Harrison Ford getting so much attention as if he is our villain (he's not, he's just a cranky old man popping pills that brings on a CGI-laced tantrum. On the other hand he does end up in jail for some pretty egregious past activities). I certainly feel sorry for anyone who has a thin awareness of past Marvel movies walking in on this film.
Reportedly this movie was shot and reshot so that it is really 2.5 movies***, and the cutting and recutting is evident on the screen as we get abrupt transitions and collapsed time in the story where things suddenly speed up (editing is very uneven) without much explanation and the sense that there are important things missing is noted. Perhaps there will be an extended-version release later, but because parts of this film are flat and procedural in a way that doesn't help the characters be interesting (and bored some people in the audience I saw the movie with, though nothing like on the scale of Quantumania) it feels like too much of Captain America Brave New World exists to be cogs in the wheel of the plot instead of telling us a story. Maybe sticking in all that excised footage would tell Captain America Brave New World's story better, but also make it unwatchable.
As it is, the film is tedious in places and is simply not crafted well in the story construction, an issue that ironically used to plague the DC Warner films, but has now migrated to Marvel. With DC it looked like part of the messiness was the result of panic in the executive offices as big-name super-productions either bombed or under performed, and now that Marvel is watching the same thing happening to them, maybe that "panic" is what's upsetting what was previously a steady hand when it came to just telling the stories clearly.
As a result of all the shooting and reshooting, presumably, we've got the disarray of Captain America Brave New World, but there is energy in long sections of the movie and Mackie's Captain is fine as Steve Rogers' replacement without being, as noted in the film, "not Steve Rogers." There are showcase scenes where Harrison Ford dominates (probably too much for a film in which he is neither the hero nor the villain) and a sincere and strong, and under used Carl Lumbly (playing the original test-subject Isaiah Bradley who was used for manufacturing a "Captain America") should have had more to do or been intertwined into the activities of Harrison Ford or Mackie more.
Instead, the team of scriptwriters decided Lumbly's character should be wronged all over again and they arrange the circumstances to make it happen (such as having him shoot at, sort of, the president!) but this gets mitigated by the end and leaving open a link to another Captain America movie that could take up the matter all over again, and in that sense this film is less a feature film than a big-budget TV show episode.
Probably the biggest hole in this move is the absence of The Falcon. Yes, the Falcon suit gets handed over to Danny Ramirez to play the part Mackie used to handle, though not with anything like the drama of Chris Evans (in old man makeup) handing the shield to Mackie in the final Avengers movie, instead it just gets tossed to Ramirez like a piece of gear. And therein lies the problem: Mackie's new Captain America should be able to lament the change in roles from one he did for so many years to a new "higher ranking" one, right? Didn't being The Falcon matter? And this version of the Captain is a pretty serious guy (which, considering he is going from one fight to another, is understandable) but that characterization is miles away from the witty and snarky The Falcon played by Mackie in the past. If Captain America Brave New World needed anything besides getting the story construction straightened out, it would be to insert a load of easy (intended) humor. But like all of the characters in this film, such niceties get lost in the grinding wheels of the plot.
This film is far less well-crafted than, say,The Marvels yet it is somehow the better movie. The difference lies in the performances. Despite the story’s messiness, it remains fairly easy to follow, but America Brave New World seems to be aiming for the seriousness and complexity of The Winter Soldier and Civil War, but it never comes close. In that sense, Brave New World occupies a place in the franchise much like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny does in its own — a kind of malformed sibling to better films.
Captain America Brave New World is too earnest in its main mission: to make the audience accept that Mackie is the new Captain America****, which, unless you simply hate the movie or Mackie (or Ford!), is accomplished because Mackie's Captain America survives all the disasters thrown at him by the plot, and, I think, from being in this untidy, logic-compromised movie itself.
But, even if good box office lasts for this movie (and the opening weekend seems to be hitting very decent numbers) another film like this is going to sink Captain America's future, no matter who plays the part.
Footnotes:
* Does he need to pull down all his The Falcon posters and put up new Captain America posters?
** Probably best shown when Steve Rogers is compelled to battle Tony Stark over a point of what's right and what's wrong in regards to dealing with Bucky.
*** I've heard this has been debunked, so maybe it isn't true.
**** It gets a little silly to keep the other characters in the film to regularly announce that the new Captain America is a good Captain America. It is as if the filmmakers feel they've really got to sell this idea of competence to the popcorn eaters out in the dark. Hey, man! I already bought a ticket! You don't have to sell the movie to me twice!
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Original Page Feb 15, 2025 | Updated Feb 21, 2025