The announcement of Robert Downey Jr.’s return to the MCU for Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars last July was a not-so-subtle admission of the mess that stands before the most powerful franchise in cinema. It doesn’t take a genius on the level of Tony Stark to figure out what went wrong. It’s easy to point the finger at the multiverse, or the departures of the MCU’s original core, but Marvel possesses one of the deepest benches in popular culture, as well as the bank account to hire anyone they want.

The simple reality is that the stories have been bad.  Plenty of the films have spent too much time looking at the past to bring anything new to the table. Others try to compensate for a lack of innovation by introducing new characters, without having the space to give them anything interesting to do. Captain America: Brave New World delivers on the promise first established at the end of Endgame. After a rather unnecessary six-episode build-up in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) finally gets his turn with the shield. Unfortunately, his film doesn’t have anything to say.

Brave New World barely acknowledges the events of Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Aside from the inclusion of Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) and Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), viewers would miss absolutely nothing if they skipped the Disney+ series. The 35th feature film in the MCU instead possesses a bizarre infatuation with the second film in the franchise, 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. When William Hurt originally reprised the role of Thaddeus Ross for Captain America: Civil War eight years after his debut in The Incredible Hulk, he remarked that he felt it was a completely new iteration of the character. Now, eight years after Civil War, and with Harrison Ford taking over for the late Hurt, Brave New World wants to hone in on intense specifics from his first appearance sixteen years ago.

The plot of Brave New World is fairly boilerplate. Captain America and his team are dispatched to stop the illegal sale of adamantium (the metal in Wolverine’s body, not to be confused with vibranium, found in Wakanda) procured from the Celestial that popped up in the middle of the Indian Ocean back in 2021’s little-loved Eternals. After a brief skirmish with associates of the Serpent Society leader Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito), Sam and Joaquin are invited to the White House by Thaddeus Ross, now the President. At Sam’s insistence, Isaiah is also brought along as a way to make amends for the U.S. government’s detention of him for thirty years, experimenting on him in a fashion that evokes the Tuskegee Airman.

Isaiah and several others are brainwashed into an assassination attempt on Ross, who is trying to put together a coalition to stop the arms race over the adamantium. Sam spends most of the film trying to prove Isaiah’s innocence, even though American intelligence is presumably aware of the existence of super-powered villains capable of mind control. The lack of motive for why an old man and several other random assailants would want to kill the president is only superficially addressed.

Mackie is a very confident leading man. Sam’s rapport with Joaquin and Isaiah is a little forced, evoking nodes of Wilson’s brotherly banter with Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan, relegated to a cameo after major supporting roles in every other Captain America), but Mackie does a remarkable job filling the void left behind by Steve Rogers. Unfortunately, despite having five credited screenwriters, no one seems interested in giving this Captain America a story that lives up to the first three, too often cribbing off the themes from The Winter Soldier, often regarded as among the best of the MCU.

Brave New World is never as incoherent as other post-Endgame releases such as Thor: Love and Thunder, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Quantumania, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, or The Marvels. It’s also just not a fundamentally compelling film. Director Julius Onah crafts a few solid action sequences, but Sam shows off his best choreography in the first fifteen minutes. The rest of the narrative is a lot of build-up with no real payoff.

Despite a budget of close to 200 million, the MCU has rarely felt smaller than Brave New World, which often feels like an episode of The West Wing without any of the quippy writing or coherent plot progression. The special effects look ugly. A confrontation between the American and Japanese navies lacks any stakes, coming across as decidedly cheap. The MCU once found a way to weave dozens of character’s storylines into a single film. Now we have to watch Thaddeus Ross whine about his daughter Betty (Liv Tyler), who won’t see him because of the events of a film from 2008 that many in the audience are bound to have forgotten about. 

Part of the issue is that Brave New World seems to settle on a villain-by-committee strategy. Esposito, a highly skilled practitioner of the art of the bad guy, is given practically nothing to do. The film instead looks to The Incredible Hulk’s Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson) to be the puppet master pulling the strings. Like Esposito, Nelson shows up ready to play. He’s just not given much to work with. Ross’ long-awaited transformation into Red Hulk is quite pathetic. Ford looks lethargic throughout the entire film, understandably bored out of his mind.

 Captain America: Brave New World is far from the worst MCU release of the post-Endgame era. It’s also not a very good movie. The film doesn’t have much of a natural flow, possibly the result of extensive reshoots, or possibly just its over-reliance on a film that came out sixteen years ago, before Disney even owned Marvel. The Incredible Hulk has aged well in a way, perhaps owing to the fact that it didn’t have many obligations to the broader continuity in the then-nascent MCU. For a film that was ostensibly given the runway to do its own thing, Brave New World has no idea what it wants to be. 

captain america brave new world incredible hulk brave new world