14 Feb Captain America: Bland New World?

Captain America: Brave New World  is more placeholder than blockbuster, and it might have worked better as a Disney+ sequel series. But it’s better than you probably expected.

If there is a single word that sums up the various, intersecting plots of this latest MCU sequel it is “doubt.” Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson seems as concerned about his worthiness in the title role as the Marvel fans who made Chris Evans into a bonafide movie star.  Danny Ramirez’ Joaquin Torres uses false bravado to hide the fear that his defacto Falcon is inferior to Wilson’s. Korean War era Cap, Isaiah Bradley, doubts that his country has his best interest at heart. Harrison Ford’s Thunderbolt Ross openly doubts his own ability to overcome the mistakes of his past, creating a conflict of integrity, legacy, perception, and (of course) anger management. Lastly, Shira Haas is introduced as President Ross’ personal security chief, and she serves as a red herring while seemingly simultaneously representing the audience as a kind of proxy for the suspension of disbelief.

But it is via the villains that this all-encompassing metaphor fails, because neither Giancarlo Esposito’s Sidewinder, fellow Serpent Society baddie, Copperhead (played by Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson), nor especially Tim Blake Nelson’s Samuel Sterns (aka The Leader) showcase ANY doubt. That makes them surface-level antagonists at best, ensuring that the stakes never really get too high.

Boring villains aside, the biggest failing is that so many of the threads that this film sought to tie-up have been long forgotten by all but the most die-hard comic fans, and several others are delivered with no context whatsoever. What can serve as an entertaining puzzle for the wiki fandom crowd can be completely disengaging for general audiences (possibly by design, but more on that later).

Anybody who either didn’t watch Eternals or dismissed it from memory will be wondering about the giant statue in the Indian Ocean because the only references to Tiamut outside that film have been Easter Eggs at best – mostly blink and you’ll miss them articles in newspapers, and soundbites emanating from TV or Radio under character dialogue. If you didn’t watch Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+ you will be wondering from the pre-credit sequence, “Who is this new sidekick dude named Joaquin?” and shortly thereafter, “Wait… there was a Black Captain America before Sam Wilson?”

Of all the not-so-familiar things shoehorned into the 35th movie in the MCU chronology, audiences are likely to find Harrison Ford’s presence most befuddling even though his is a character with the most MCU history in the entire film. Theatergoers are supposed to remember General Thaddeus Thunderbolt Ross, who was first introduced in Ang Lee’s 2003 Hulk movie via actor Sam Elliott. Neither successful in terms of box office nor acclaim (and possibly not even cannon), the series was relaunched with an all-different cast as part of the MCU build-up to Avengers. That second jade giant outing gave us William Hurt as Ross and Liv Tyler as his daughter (and Bruce Banner’s girlfriend) Betty. Confusingly, it feels like more of a sequel to Ang Lee’s movie than a complete reboot, and Captain America: Brave New World seems more like a sequel to Louis Leterrier’s 2008 Incredible Hulk than to any Captain America or Avengers film since.

William Hurt would reprise his role as Secretary of State Thunderbolt Ross in Captain America: Civil War and Black Widow as well as a brief appearance in Avengers: Infinity War and a non-speaking cameo in Endgame. Completists will add that he also appears in the MCU One Shot: The Consultant, which was initially released as an extra on the Thor blu-ray in 2011. The character was voiced by other performers in episodes of What If…? and Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man cartoons on Disney+.

Harrison Ford took over the role after Hurt’s death. But unlike his replacement casting for Alec Baldwin in the role of Jack Ryan for the films Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger (each based on novels in Tom Clancy’s political thriller series), Ford’s first appearance was only two years after Baldwin’s and it was as the main character, so there was no question about whether or not this was the same CIA analyst featured in The Hunt For Red October. So if your date or co-worker looked confused during and after the movie, don’t go DefCon Nerd on them – Harrison Ford is a person you wouldn’t likely forget, and this is the first time any of us is seeing him as Ross; it’s very easy to think that this is a new character. If they didn’t watch She-Hulk, on Disney+ they may think they missed a chunk of this story. Spoiler: They didn’t.

That takes care of most of the loose ends, but if you found yourself wondering about the Serpent Society, don’t be too hard on yourself: this is an obscure set of characters from not-the-best run of Captain America comics that has been injected into the ongoing plot without origin nor explanation. Most comic fans only know who they are from following the many comic book value speculation shows on youtube which leaked the Serpent Society back when Brave New World was titled New World Order.

With so much left unexplained, this intuitively would have benefit from a longer format. Not a longer running time, but as an episodic series. It seems clear that the many reshoots merely supplied more material to edit out, and a bearable runtime is one of the only benefits. It seems clear that MCU execs chose an equitable hour and 58 minutes over coherence. It’s possible that they intentionally left things unexplained as a kind of marketing tool for Disney+, since all the missing info is spread across hours of content available via a streaming subscription. Is that a gamble that will pay off? I doubt it, but only time will tell.

That leads us to more standard areas of discontent.

When we are first introduced to Shira Haas as Ruth Bat-Seraph, it’s important to realize that there is no chyron graphic with her name on it, so phonetically it sounds like a nebulously Russian name: Badsiroff (or Bets-are-off, if Bond villains are your jam). We don’t get her backstory until several minutes later, when it is revealed that she’s Israeli born and a survivor of the Red Room program from Black Widow. So it immediately seems stupid that a foreign national is the President of the United States’ head of security. But even more absurd than that is her size. I looked it up online almost immediately upon getting home. Her height is listed variably between 5’0″ and 5’2″, but there is NO WAY she is taller than 4’11. I heard several fellow theater goers asking their friends and dates if she was a midget or a dwarf (the latter of which would suggest a height of 4’10” or less). In some circles these days the word “midget” is a pejorative, and so I apologize if this offends you. I stand between 5″5′ and 5″6′ so I am not here to height shame anybody, but this strikes me as weird casting.

In a film filled with obscure callbacks, this is a part that could have elevated a performer from a prior brief appearance to co-star status. There were two dozen actresses with stunt experience that survived the actual Red Room from the Black Widow film. Seeing one of them again (but in a broader role) would have been really cool. I could have sworn I saw Sasha Lane as one of the Black Widows, but she is not credited so I may be mistaken. She most definitely was Hunter C-20, though, and that would have been an interesting callback to Loki on Disney+ that would have provided a 616 identity to a beloved multi-verse character in the guise of an award-winning actress. There was also an opportunity to reintroduce one of the fan-favorite Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., like Ming-Na Wen or Chloe Bennet.  If Disney execs were hellbent on introducing someone new, this would have been a great opportunity to cast Dua Lipa in an ongoing Marvel role. If they were dead set on her being Israeli, they could have gone after Gal Godot. Shira Haas is lovely, I’m sure, but in this movie she looks like a ten-year-old boy, and it’s weird.

This brings us to the special FX and a particularly goofy choice in character design.

Tim Blake Nelson was introduced as Dr. Samuel Sterns in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. While assisting Bruce Banner on a cure for his hulk-dom, he is forced to inject Emil Blonsky with a sample of Banner’s blood, resulting in the creating of The Abomination. During the destruction of his lab, Sterns, too, is infected with the gamma rich DNA and we see the beginning of a transformation that isn’t revealed until Brave New World – even though we’ve seen Tim Roth return in the aforementioned MCU One Shot: The Consultant and the She-Hulk: Attorney at Law  Streaming Series. If you’ve been keeping track, you now realize that it’s been 17 years since he’s had screen time in the MCU.

The Leader is a very specific-looking character in the comics, bordering on the ridiculous.  While not as exaggerated as M.O.D.O.K., given the poor reception to the latter in Antman & the Wasp: Quantumania it’s easy to see the execs at Disney deciding to go a different way. But here they sort-of split the difference and instead of the olive, hydrocephalic icon created by Steve Ditko in the pages of Tales to Astonish, we get an equally unbelievable doppelganger of Bruce McCulloch’s Cabbage Head from The Kids in the Hall with the “realism” of Aylmer from Frank Henenlotter’s Brain Damage.

Some of the earliest scenes to show the CGI costume transformations of Sam Wilson’s Captain America and Joquin Torres’ Falcon are also objectively imperfect and likely to get some improvements by the time this gets to Disney+. But the aerial battles over the Indian Ocean are really exciting and there is a level of swashbuckling there and during the final face-off between Cap and the Red Hulk that should satisfy most popcorn gobblers.  I feel like it was a missed opportunity to showcase a conflict with Japan and not introduce Sunfire, but that would have likely resulted in yet another go-nowhere thread that could take a decade or more to tie.

Harrison Ford brings a heretofore unseen degree of pathos to the character of Ross and while he stops short of making him likable, he succeeds in making him somewhat sympathetic. Carl Lumbly is the stand-out, and more than anything this film makes me hungry for an Isaiah Bradley series or film. Unlike Anthony Mackie’s Cap/Falcon hybrid, Lumbly is undeniably a super soldier. In the world of 2025, there is as much tension with North Korea as there has ever been, so seeing a black Captain America smacking-down the Commies across the 38th parallel in the 1950s seems like something Americans on either side of the contemporary political fence can enjoy.

Captain America: Brave New World has five credited writers, but the story still seems thin. At some point each draft probably removed rather than added to the story but there are at least a couple of choices that make me think some of the final draft was approved with a post-election compromise in mind. Ross is presented as a somewhat populist type of president with an authoritarian past. His head of security is Israeli. The bad guy considers himself a hero with the singular goal of exposing Ross as a fraud and will sacrifice seemingly anything to do it, though his ability to calculate probability suggests that no variable is really left to chance because he ultimately succeeds. This allows both right and left to own the surface message, but with such second-string characters Marvel and Disney are going to have to work a bit harder to convince audiences that this is must-see entertainment. And I’d argue they’re going to have to make something a bit more worthy of that claim, too. ★★☆