I don’t need movies to save me. In a spiritual sense, one could say that they already have, but, in a literal sense, determined leaders do more for our quality of life than good art. Unfortunately, both are in short supply these days. Marvel Studios’s latest offering, Captain America: Brave New World, is a superhero movie, but not really a comic book movie. There used to not be a distinction, but more and more the outlines of two genres are forming: one where art, theme, and form are united through some method of abstraction (say animation, style, or structure), to express a vision about the state of the world, and another genre that is trying its hardest not to do any of that. This is one of the latter, and like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, it’s terrified of being asked to save anyone.
L-R: Captain America/Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Joaquin Torres/The Falcon (Danny Ramirez) and Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) in Marvel Studios’ CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2024 MARVEL.
Keeping it brief at the top: to place the word “brave” in the title of the latest Captain America movie is an offense to the talent cursed with performing in it and to the word itself. Anthony Mackie (Twisted Metal; Eight Mile), Harrison Ford (The Fugitive; Raiders of the Lost Ark), Danny Ramirez (Top Gun: Maverick; Stars at Noon), Carl Lumbly (A Cure for Wellness; How Stella Got Her Groove Back), and Tim Blake Nelson (Cherish; O Brother Where Art Thou) are all wasted so egregiously by dialogue dumbed down so you can listen to it while folding laundry that the WGA (Writers’ Guild of America) should probably have taken every person’s name off the paper in arbitration. Is it that bad you ask? Yes, it is.
“Please, DON’T be BOOOORRING!” – Tim Blake Nelson as Samuel Sterns
One of my favorite possessions is a hardcover collection of black and white EC comics titled Judgement Day and other stories (2014), illustrated by Joe Orlando. I don’t need movies to save me, but the people from whom we need saving always seem afraid that one will. If you remember the opening of Into the Spider-Verse (2019), it began with “Approved by the Comics Code Authority,” a reference to the self-governing trade organization that collaborated with Joseph McCarthy’s HUAC to censor comic books for decades. The comic that offended people of power so much that self-censorship was forced on the workers was Judgement Day (1953). It’s the story of a planet of segregated robots applying for entrance into a galactic alliance and being denied by a Black astronaut. You should read it for yourself; it still has the power to move you to tears. Comic books have a direct line between the artist’s heart and the audience a pen-length long. It’s why the characters of that medium become so iconic, so defined. Captain America punched Hitler before we were even in the war, a message from two Jewish writers to the people of New York City after the American Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden. The images of a Black man standing up for what’s right and of Captain America rallying fellow Americans against politically popular hate are two of the most important images and ideas in the very medium that Marvel movies are supposed to adapt, especially this Marvel movie. Instead, this is a film with three scenes, just three scenes, about Sam Wilson as Captain America. He’s in most scenes in the movie, but most of the scenes are about The President of the United States™, Thaddeus Thunderbolt Ross, and whether or not the office of the President can redeem a flawed man.
It never has.
L-R: Harrison Ford as President Thaddeus Ross and Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson/Captain America in Marvel Studios’ CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD. Photo by Eli Adé. © 2024 MARVEL.
“But he is the President.”
This is actually a great idea for a movie, and the fingerprints of the original screenwriter Malcolm Spellman (Falcon and the Winter Soldier; Empire) can still be seen in the 5 minutes or so of this 2-hour movie that thinks about that question. It’s an idea that might have still come through if the legendary William Hurt (The Big Chill; Broadcast News) had been alive to portray the person the film is about. Instead, Harrison Ford has been egregiously miscast as the bitter, angry enemy of the Hulk to remind you of Air Force One (1997). Harrison Ford is one of the great movie stars, but you cannot swap any actor for any other. He and Hurt simply worked too differently in style and form, and the one time they try to flashback to Ford as the mustachioed angry general, it feels like an SNL sketch. Just think about Harrison Ford playing the broken revolutionary dreamer of The Big Chill (1983). You can’t. Even the instinct to invoke Air Force One to audiences is wrong because Captain America: Brave New World is walking in the footsteps of a different ‘90s political thriller, The Pelican Brief (1993). That is also a film about a Black man watching a white person wrestle with whether the office of the President can redeem the past of the person in it. Somehow, Cap 4 manages to be even more screwed over by the mandates of executives than Pelican Brief was when they wouldn’t let a Black man kiss a white woman. Today, they won’t even let this Black man be the star of his own movie.
The press has talked to death and will talk to death about the reshoots of the film and their obvious restructuring to avoid political third rails. Whether or not Ross is supposed to invoke the anger of Trump or the grief of Biden or both are confused by a cobbled-together edit that brings different performances by Ford into the same scenes. Words are dubbed over and emotional logic was left on the editing bay floor. The inclusion of Israel’s obscure Marvel superhero Sabra is the film’s second-biggest weakness, and the reshoots placed a spotlight on that flaw. She’s been reworked into Ruth, an ex-Black Widow working directly for the President, and Shira Haas’s costume and acting in the role would be considered too cheap for the CW’s Arrow (2012-2020) and maybe the worst performance in any Marvel film ever.
L-R: Joaquin Torres/The Falcon (Danny Ramirez) and Captain America/Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) in Marvel Studios’ CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD . Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2024 MARVEL.
The question of whether or not political power can be redemptive is an American idea channeled through the motto of “American excellence.” In the corpse of the film, buried under the reshoots and rewrites and panic over audience reaction to Trump, Gaza, and other real-word events paralleled in the narrative, there is a triangle of enhancement in the name of excellence. Black excellence under the white gaze as Sam Wilson struggles with whether or not to take the Super Soldier Serum, Ross becomes the Red Hulk as an analogy for America’s history of war crimes in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and Isaiah Bradley struggles with freedom being the domestic cost of that military and scientific might. But there is no “American excellence” on display in Captain America: Brave New World. It looks worse than any other Marvel project, bar none. It is dramatically inert, and even the editing cannot rise to the standard of serviceable.
Red Hulk/President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) in Marvel Studios’ CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2024 MARVEL.
There is a very well-intentioned impulse online to say that audiences need to turn out for the film, even if it’s bad, because Anthony Mackie deserves our support as a leading man. He does, in something else. There is fear that if it loses money, the film will be used as the precedent for turning down Black-lead superhero films. The Black Panther (2018; 2022) and Spider-Verse (2018; 2023) films have made billions of dollars, racist decisions are and will be made anyway. Some will say that politics do not belong in film, and we should focus on fun. This is the film that tried that, and there is no fun to be had, except that after 15 years of not letting a Hulk smash anything, it is nice to see that for a minute or two. But if I want to pay $20 to see a Hulk smash stuff, I could buy a used copy of Ang Lee’s Hulk (2003) at least twice. That’s what I recommend.
In theaters February 14th, 2025.
For more information, head to the official Marvel Studios Captain America: Brave New World webpage.
Final Score: 1 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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