It seems unfair that one movie has to carry the weight of a whole studio on its back, but things haven't been going so great for Marvel lately. With a new Captain America making his big screen debut, Captain America: Brave New World arrives saddled with a lot of baggage, and that's before the movie even starts.
Brave New World picks up from the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson took up the mantle of Cap. Now firmly ensconced in a role he previously resisted, the film opens with Sam's discomfort working for President Thaddeus Ross (previously played by the late William Hurt, now Harrison Ford, making his MCU debut) who once imprisoned Sam in the Raft.
Their relationship begins to crumble after Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), a Korean War-era super soldier and mentor to Wilson, is brainwashed and tries to kill Ross. With his friend facing a death sentence and Ross's motives looking increasingly shady, Sam has to sort out who's behind the assassination attempt before they can strike again.
Framed as a political thriller, Brave New World, in many ways, recalls Captain America: The Winter Soldier, one of the better entries into the MCU and arguably the best of the Captain America franchise. But it's a bit of a Russian nesting doll, wrapped in the sort of modular storytelling that's become the studio's trademark. That larger story — the one that will carry into the upcoming Thunderbolts* and across Phase Six of the MCU — folds in events and characters from 2008's The Incredible Hulk involving something called the Serpent Society, led by Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) and a gamma ray-poisoned cellular biologist played by Tim Blake Nelson.
For those of us who have come this far on the MCU journey, we're ready for long-term narrative payoffs. Problem is, those long-term narratives increasingly feel arbitrary and sloppily shoehorned in. Was this really the best place to introduce adamantium? If there are X-Men movies on the horizon, yes; but even so, Brave New World's interest in world-building comes at the expense of character development. Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), the new Falcon, gets plenty of screen time, and we're introduced to another veteran of the Black Widow program. Director Julius Onah, though, doesn't give viewers many reasons to care about any of these characters — even Sam Wilson — beyond stock tropes.
Onah does a serviceable job with what he's given, delivering the action while advancing the larger narrative. There are five credited writers, including Onah, and it shows. The dialogue is leaden, and the exposition is delivered in clunky bursts. It flicks at ideas like power's corrupting influence and faith in institutions, but doesn't have much to say about them. Carl Lumbly's Isaiah, wrongly imprisoned and experimented on for years and now fearful of a return to jail, provides the film with its most compelling character. Lumbly aptly conveys the weight of being wrongly accused of crimes; unfortunately, that plotline is mostly a MacGuffin included to push Wilson into action.
The original Marvel movies worked because they focused on the character's real-world problems and relationships. The long-term payoffs were secondary and always crystal clear: the Avengers initiative, Thanos is coming, etc. Brave New World prevails only as a thriller burdened by the weight of larger storytelling expectations — a complaint that could describe many latter-day Marvel movies and further proof that the studio has lost its way. The only question now is, how much longer will audiences even care to complain?