I wrote a somewhat long-winded review:
Captain America: Brave New World (2025)
There’s no two ways about it: the Marvel Cinematic Universe has a crack in its foundational worldbuilding, and that issue could be called the Pepper Potts Problem. As in: where the heck
is she? When Steve Rogers was thawed out around 2010 (the franchise has always mostly been vague about specific dates), the Avengers Initiative was a S.H.I.E.L.D. project, and Iron Man was a politically unaffiliated adventurer. (S.H.I.E.L.D.’s governmental status was annoying unclear; it seemed distinctly American in the first two MCU films until
The Avengers introduced a supervisory World Security Council, but this was a tolerable vagary.) When S.H.I.E.L.D. fell in 2014, The Avengers were folded in Stark Enterprises as an independent organization; so far, so good. The group then more or less disbanded in 2016’s
Captain America: Civil War, before an ad hoc reunion at the Avengers Compound in 2019’s
Endgame, whose battle resulted in Tony Stark’s death. Again, all this is straightforward enough.
Since then, however, the political landscape of the universe has gotten damned confusing. 2021’s
WandaVision introduced S.W.O.R.D., a clearly American governmental agency to fill S.H.I.E.L.D.’s vacuum. In 2019’s
Spider-Man: Far From Home, we briefly saw Nick Fury working on a space station, which was subsequently revealed to orbit Earth and to belong to S.A.B.E.R, a seemingly
separate organization staffed in large part by the alien Skrulls. Is there any other connection between these agencies? Any friction? Who knows?
Meanwhile, 2021’s
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier showed that Sam “Falcon” Wilson had virtually no monetary support from the Avengers, which was somewhat understandable given that he’d joined Rogers in crashing out of the team years before. He was also working with the Air Force in the series premiere, which should have given him some resources, but he didn’t seem to have fully rejoined the service, and may have been operating as a contractor, despite not being an enhanced individual, and with no other apparent means of maintaining his wingsuit technology. By the end of that miniseries, he finally accepted the mantle of Captain America that Rogers had passed to him, but his institutional affiliation, if any, remained unclear.
What, then, became of The Avengers as an ongoing enterprise? It’s a question Sprite asks onscreen in 2021’s
Eternals, to no answer. Had Pepper Potts, who’d become CEO of Stark Enterprises as far back as 2010’s
Iron Man 2, formally disbanded the group, and/or retired, now that she was a widowed mother of a young girl? And exactly what was the American government’s leadership up to during this time? After 2013’s
Iron Man 3, in which President Ellis played a key role (and his vice president was arrested), no U.S. head of state was mentioned until
Wakanda Forever name-checked a new president named Ritson, who became a significant player in the following year’s miniseries
Secret Invasion. That series, which was disastrously reviewed and which I haven’t seen, culminated with President Ritson declaring war on all aliens residing on Earth, despite New Asgard having been shown in both 2022’s
Thor: Love and Thunder and 2023’s
The Marvels to be a thriving European colony of immensely powerful extra-terrestrials.
This brings us, at last, to 2025’s
Captain America: Brave New World, in which the newly inaugurated President Ross invites Wilson to the White House, and asks him to re-form The Avengers as a governmental entity. When the latter hesitates, Ross doesn’t threaten to cut off Sam’s military support, but maybe that would have been his next move. Though it’s understandable that Wilson hadn’t anticipated Ross making such a suggestion, this nonetheless puts viewers in the frustrating position of agreeing with Ross to at least some degree: why
haven’t the Avengers been maintained or reconstituted yet?!
As for the movie itself… well, there’s not a lot to say. It repeats lots of story beats from
The Winter Soldier (opening confrontation in an isolated setting with civilian hostages, a roadside ambush, a cranky, older black mentor, brainwashed assassins, a forgotten military complex hiding a captive sinister genius, an unusually combat-capable petite woman, and a climactic brawl in DC), but there’s a pervasive vibe of lightweight disposability that makes it feel more like
Black Widow. This is the – oy –
thirty-fifth Marvel Studios flick, not counting any of the TV series, and it’s a direct continuation of storylines from 2008’s
The Incredible Hulk and 2021’s
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, with a key dash of 2021’s
Eternals, but it isn’t a satisfying follow-up to any of those: despite several mentions, there’s no appearance from Bruce Banner, and only a brief cameo from Liv Tyler’s Betty Ross, and no mention of the Eternals (let alone Jennifer “She-Hulk” Walters, who could have served as a badly needed legal resource).
The movie’s most effective element is Carl Lumbly as Isaiah Bradley, reprising his role from the miniseries, but it’s a shame his grandson Eli Bradley goes entirely unmentioned. Given his character’s history, Lumbly being persecuted by the government
again is poignant and affecting, but the ease with which he and others become brainwashed (apparently a few flashes of a cell phone screen is all it takes to become a murderous drone) is an embarrassingly cheap narrative contrivance lifted from, or at the very least shared by, a mediocre
Smallville episode. What’s more, the villainous Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) doesn’t seem at all interested in the thematic implications of using Lumbly in this manner.
Just about all the other characters are similarly underdeveloped. There’s no mention of the vice president, Danny Ramirez’s Joaquin Torres (also from the miniseries) is blandly likable but has no arc, Giancarlo Esposito’s mysterious assassin feels far too old to be a money-hungry assassin-for-hire, Shira Haas’ Israeli former Black Widow Ruth Bat-Seraph is a blank, and the revelation that Bucky Barnes is now running for Congress is as baffling as it is abrupt. Anthony Mackie gets a nice scene late in the proceedings when he wishes he’d taken a super solider serum when he had the chance, but this is in jarring contrast to his attitude from the miniseries, isn’t adequately built up to, and goes nowhere. Sterns, meanwhile, makes for an underwhelming and unmemorable adversary, and Don Cheadle’s James Rhodes is frustratingly MIA.
Finally, there’s Harrison Ford as the newly elected President Ross, taking over the role from the late William Hurt, who died in 2022. Ford feels fully engaged, and has some first-rate shouting exchanges with Mackie, but the decision to make his Red Hulk mute (apart from the roaring, that is) limits the third act’s dramatic potential to a mere tussle. Although several elements of the character feel unnervingly topical (a senseless rage monster of a chief executive, a presidential assassination attempt, and a helicopter crash near the White House, to name a few), the movie, which was originally intended to release in Joe Biden’s last full year in office, certainly doesn’t have anything meaningful to say about the contemporary U.S. Once again, this is a MCU movie in which everyday people are virtually absent, and we don’t get any sense of how the general public feels about Wilson having become Captain America, let alone how they feel or felt about the also-unmentioned John Walker.
All in all,
Brave New World very much feels like a middling episode of a long-running superhero TV series, leaning heavily on callbacks, going through the plot motions, and having little to say. It’s a pleasant enough watch, and I’m glad it’s not outright bombing at the box office, despite a franchise-low critical reception. I still believe in Sam Wilson’s Captain America, but it’ll take more than a disposable outing such as this to earn him the laurels he’s capable of earning. Will the next MCU flick
Thunderbolts* be more satisfying? It certainly seems odd that they’re getting a prime summer release, whereas Cap himself was relegated to February. In any case, after several years of middling Marvel entries on the big and small screens, which have mostly treaded water, narratively speaking, it’s high time for a new Avengers team-up to shake the franchise out of its doldrums... or at
least a genuinely fantastic
Fantastic Four.
Grade:
B-
