Captain America: Brave New World

Steve Rogers may have retired, but Captain America lives on in Sam Wilson - a true patriot who still wonders if he should have inherited the Captain's vibranium shield and whether he should have chugged a bottle of super serum too. After a failed assassination attempt on President Ross frames Wilson's friend, his loyalty to his country is also tested, and together with a few allies, he unravels a conspiracy that threatens to erupt into a full-scale world war.

Following up a film like the brilliant Captain America: The Winter Soldier is not an easy task, and it's clear that the Winter Soldier has acted as a source of inspiration here as Anthony Mackie's superhero gets his own wings in his first solo film. Well, the first solo project was actually the miniseries The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and it was a downright awful comic book adventure that did the character no favours whatsoever.

I get a bit of the same feeling now that Wilson is stepping onto the big screen, because Brave New World feels at least as claustrophobic as the show. We're dealing with a rather subdued comic book suspense that doesn't exactly offer any surprises or any political nerve. Spineless plotting and uneven pacing make this a sleepy political thriller with very few politics and very few thrills. This is not another Winter Soldier, unfortunately.

The highlight is Harrison Ford who, despite lacking a moustache, manages to give the film a little more dimension than the flat script. It's great to see Ford playing the President of the United States again, who, despite his age, still has plenty of acting quality left in him. There were also some sequences, like the conflict in the Indian Ocean, that I found engaging and I liked to some extent the music which managed to be more exciting than the plot itself.

I wish I had more positive things to say about Tim Blake Nelson's surprising inclusion, who unfortunately feels wasted as the film's main antagonist. For once, I'm familiar with the comic book character he plays and the film interpretation is straight out of the CW universe. To say that the whole thing was disappointing would be an understatement and in the end, it was more entertaining to guess which scenes were "reshoots" than to actually follow the lifeless characters.

There's a lot of talk about why Sam Wilson was the man to shoulder the Captain America title and whether he should represent America's interests, but ultimately we don't see much of this other than in platitudes, and Mackie lacks the charisma of Chris Evans. The subtitle Brave New World suggests that big changes are afoot in the Marvel world, but the film itself hardly breaks any new ground and is more of the generic comic book action flick with the same questionable digital effects we've become accustomed to since Endgame. I think Brave New World is best experienced once it comes to Disney+ to be streamed in the background.