The movie Captain America: Brave New World isn’t named that except in the ads. On screen, the title card reads Brave New World only. I don’t know why this is, but there’s something weirdly honest about it.
The movie centers on the woes of Sam Wilson—a minor Avenger nicknamed Falcon before he was given a magical shield and a much better superhero handle in the final scene of the Marvel Cinematic Universe climax, 2019’s Endgame. Sam doesn’t feel up to the job of being Captain America. And guess what? He isn’t. Now, the movie doesn’t say that. I am saying that. But Marvel knows I’m right. Maybe that’s why the words "Captain America" don’t appear on the title card.
The movie can’t decide if Sam is being made to feel less-than by our evil white supremacist culture, given that Sam is black—or whether he’s exhausted because he feels like he must represent all underrepresented people, because he’s black. All I’m saying is, he’s black, and that’s pretty much all the movie is saying about Sam Wilson, who appears to have two friends and no family and no backstory and is of absolutely no interest as a character. The original Captain America, Steve Rogers, had a wonderful backstory in which he was a 90-lb. weakling genetically engineered during World War II into a giant hunk of a guy who only agreed to the tampering to help save his country but found himself relegated to being a show pony in patriotic pageants. Apparently only white guys get good backstories.
If Sam weren’t as good as Steve Rogers, that would be evidence he was only chosen to carry the shield because he was black. Now, in one sense, that would be fine, no? I mean, if Sam is there to represent the marginalized people in our society, then he was a diversity hire—and what would be wrong with that in the eyes of Hollywood’s liberal culture? After all, Hollywood literally casts roles by putting out casting calls and saying which parts need to be "diverse."
On the other hand, why couldn’t Sam Wilson be just as good a Captain America as a white guy? Perhaps he could have been… if he weren’t played by Anthony Mackie. While we’re supposed to decide by the end of this picture that Sam Wilson is just as magnetic and compelling as Steve Rogers, Marvel can’t fix what’s wrong with Anthony Mackie as a performer.
His problem is that he is nowhere near as magnetic or compelling as Chris Evans, who played the original Captain America in eight Marvel films. He’s a decent second banana, with good timing when it comes to throwaway lines and insults he doesn’t mean, but he is entirely without charisma. You look at other actors when he’s on screen. He’s like an anti-star.
This is one of those worst Marvel pictures, so boring that it gives you time to reflect deeply upon what makes it so bad while you’re watching it. There are so many things wrong here that I will only mention three.
The first is that Brave New World is actually a sequel to a 17-year-old bad Marvel movie most people have never even seen—the Hulk film starring Edward Norton, who was so annoying both onscreen and off in the part that Marvel recast it with Mark Ruffalo. I didn’t ever want to think about Incredible Hulk again, but this movie forced me to, and I will never forgive it.
The villain from that picture, a general named Thaddeus Ross, becomes president in this one (limned by the late William Hurt back in 2008, Ross is played by Harrison Ford now). We’re told Ross was driven to win high office to find a way back into the good graces of his daughter Betty, who was Hulk’s girlfriend and has been mad at him ever since. Becoming president to show your kid you’ve changed seems like a massive overshot, especially since it doesn’t work.
Now, it took six or seven credited screenwriters (and a whole lot more who were uncredited) to come up with this dumbass plot, so I think in the future Marvel needs fewer writers and more common sense. The story they tell is this: President Ross wants Sam to use his Captain America-ness to help him pass a global treaty. This seems to be something Sam does not believe in, but we don’t know why, and the movie doesn’t bother to tell us. Now, if it were a treaty with Iran to allow Iran to have nuclear weapons and Sam opposed it, he would be my Captain America forever—but it’s not that. Instead, the treaty has something to do with the MacGuffin from the absolute worst Marvel movie, The Eternals.
That is the second failure of Brave New World. A sane Marvel movie would simply pretend The Eternals never happened, which is what I like to do with my first marriage.
The third failure is how the movie also requires some knowledge of the Marvel TV show called Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which featured a Black Lives Matter-inflected plot. We learn in that series that there was a black Captain America before Sam. He was a black soldier named Isaiah Bradley who drank the serum that transformed Steve Rogers a decade later, during the Korean War. But because he was black, see, he was thrown in prison for 30 years because he couldn’t be allowed to exist by the racist country that was created in 1619.
I’m sure this all makes sense to Ta-Nehisi Coates, but then, so does licking the undersole of a Hamas boot. Bradley is released from prison at the end of that TV series and becomes part of the plot in this movie. He is mind-controlled into taking a shot at the president, but very specifically mind-controlled, in that he’s supposed to miss. Man, that mind control is specific and accurate! In any case, what he’s doing in this picture and why makes no sense unless you watched the 2021 show. Which I hope you didn’t, because Falcon and the Winter Soldier was very, very bad and not worth your time even if you were a Chinese person in Wuhan who had been soldered into your apartment.
I bring Wuhan up here because the original plot of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier hinged on a pandemic, and when COVID came along they had to reshoot and retrofit it to get the pandemic out of it, leaving behind a colossal and incomprehensible mess.
Perhaps, then, it’s not surprising that Captain America: Brave New World is a colossal and incomprehensible mess too. Marvel completed filming and then took a look at what they had and said, "Oh dear Lord, we need another plot for this misbegotten thing" and brought in the gloriously villainous Giancarlo Esposito. He does bad-guy stuff in the first half and then promptly disappears. They should have stayed with him and his plotline, because it would have been better than the original. That’s the mind-control plot. Turns out there’s a scientist trapped in a prison who can mind-control anyone by playing "I’m Mr. Blue" through a cellphone. He is also mind-controlling President Ross. If "I’m Mr. Blue" is so potent, why can’t he break out of the prison by playing the song to the guards? Why does he have to wait for a pardon?
It's because he wants to mind-control President Ross into becoming a Hulk. I’m spoiling the movie for you because it spoils itself in the commercials, and because you shouldn’t see it anyway. So yes, we get to watch Ford lose it and have his pants start tearing and his hands start getting bigger until soon he is a CGI cartoon who punches Sam a lot. Now, we are told that Sam refused to take the magical elixir that would turn him into a god-like Captain America—which is supposed to answer the question of why he’s even better than Steve Rogers, because while Rogers gave people "hope," the un-super-powered Sam gives people "something to aspire to."
Still, since he has no super powers, there’s no way he could survive the assault of the Red Hulk. No matter. He’s buried under rubble and someone says, "Sam, are you okay?" and he gets up and dusts himself off and starts all over again, just as uninteresting as before. In this, as in many other ways, Marvel—for a decade the most brilliantly run enterprise in all of popular culture—reveals that it no longer knows what the hell it’s doing. It doesn’t even know what the title of its own movie is.