Six years after Steve Rogers made him the new Captain America in Avengers Endgame and four years since he accepted the mantle in miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Sam Wilson finally has his solo debut as the Avengers superhero.
Captain America: Brave New World, the 35th MCU movie, is the fourth in the solo franchise and finally hits cinemas this weekend.
It was always going to be a struggle for a sidekick character to star in a film without the original actor. And to be fair, Marvel Studios have made the best movie they could with a movie that is rumoured to have gone through extensive reshoots after poor test screenings.
It’s no wonder, then, that rather than the usual hiding of MCU spoilers, this time they’re on full display in posters and trailers to attract as big an audience as possible.
Given Anthony Mackie isn’t quite big enough a star to lead such a blockbuster, Harrison Ford playing a recast President Thaddeus Ross, who turns into the Red Hulk, is very much the big sell for the movie.
And while that brief Hulk smash sequence in the third act is the best thing about Brave New World, there’s not nearly enough of it.
Essentially Brave New World is a legacy sequel to one of the MCU’s worst films, 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, in which Ross (played by the late William Hurt) was the villain. That forgettable comic book outing featured Liv Tyler as his daughter, who makes the briefest of cameos in this movie alongside Bucky Barnes in another scene.
Meanwhile, Tim Blake Nelson finally returns as Samuel Sterns aka the Leader, whose blood was cross-contaminated with Edward Norton’s Bruce Banner. The super-intelligent, disfigured baddie is the sinister mastermind behind the film’s plot to get the US and Japan fighting over the Celestial being’s adamantium-ridden corpse that landed in the ocean during 2021’s Eternals. (Still with us?)
Given the mishandled convolution of shared narratives across MCU films and TV shows since Endgame, there’s a jarring amount of clunky exposition needed in this movie for the casual viewer. As a result, Brave New World’s all-too-serious narrative suffers from holding interest, let alone allowing for much Marvel humour at all. Too many B-tier characters is also a big issue for this film, with Giancarlo Esposito’s Sidewinder, the leader of the Serpent Society, barely getting enough screen time.
At least the Leader slowly feeding Ross with pills over the years to turn him into Red Hulk allowed for a thrilling White House lawn rampage that we haven’t really seen the likes of since Avengers: Age of Ultron. Scraping three stars, this MCU movie feels more like an average Disney+ miniseries that was turned into a film. Nevertheless, there’s just enough content here for the most loyal of fans to maintain interest. And given the end credits multiverse tease by Leader, at least there’s Avengers Doomsday and The Fantastic Four to look forward to next as Marvel Phase 6 kicks off later this year. We have a feeling those outings, plus Spider-Man 4 and Avengers Secret Wars, will be a return to form for the MCU, but we have to get through more sidekick adventures in Thunderbolts first.
Captain America: Brave New World is released in UK cinemas on Friday.