Captain America: Brave New World Review
The newest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) looks to reignite the franchise with the classic hero, Captain America. However, “Captain America: Brave New World” comes across as jumbled, uninspired, and, ultimately it is like a new recipe that you’ve really wanted to try out for a while, but the food that you eat is not close to what you imagined.
Captain America finds himself in the middle of an international incident when there is an attempted assassination on the new President of the United States, Thaddeus Ross.
This movie is headlined by Sam Wilson or Captain America played by MCU veteran, Anthony Mackey. Mackey is also joined by star Harrison Ford who plays Thaddeus Ross. While there are very notable names in this movie, especially actors with the prestige and fame these two have, the acting is not very good. While this is an MCU movie and standards might be lower than for some other movies, an audience should expect performances that are more than enough to scrape by.
The acting was not helped by the dialogue that was given either. This has the potential to be one of the worst written MCU movies to date. It is very predictable, which makes it come across as lazy, and it does turn the viewer off from the movie.
So the acting and writing were not the best. Who cares? There was still good, high flying action and VFX that are on par with movies that came out 10 years ago right? Nope. Not at all. A small part about this movie is that Sam Wilson decides not to take the Super Soldier Serum that Steve Rogers or Bucky Barnes took, and it shows. The action in this movie is very lackluster. It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly it is, but it did not feel like there were really any kind of stakes, and the fact that Wilson didn’t take the Super Soldier Serum makes it incredibly hard to believe that he survived even half of what was thrown at him. While it was lackluster, being able to see Captain America’s shield flying through the air as he took down his enemies was, as always, an amazing sight to see.
Now to the VFX. For a while, Marvel movies were looked at as nothing but cool action and VFX. The action has been talked about, but the VFX are something that cannot go overlooked. There are some shots in this movie that are so clearly a green screen background and it is wildly distracting. It’s hard to focus on Sam Wilson giving what is supposed to be a speech that turns the tide of the third act when the background is obviously not there.
From this point on, there will be spoilers about the movie. To start, each MCU movie kind of requires the viewer to be in the know about what has recently happened in the previous installment. However, this movie takes it to an extreme. Has anyone watched “The Incredible Hulk” in the last 10 years? The answer is probably no because it was the lowest rated and worst received movie in the MCU during its Phase 1.
The problem with “Captain America: Brave New World” is that it relies on the audience remembering the events of a movie that came out 17 years ago. While Thaddeus Ross has been in MCU movies since 2008, most notably “Captain America: Civil War,” the main villain of the movie, Leader, was a very small character in “The Incredible Hulk.”
On top of old villains, “Captain America: Brave New World” has too many villains. For those who don’t know, Thaddeus Ross is also the Red Hulk. In every case, Red Hulk is a villain. While in this movie, he’s not played out to be a good guy, he is teased way too much. Ultimately, it is very clear that Leader is the main antagonist of the story who is manipulating Thaddeus Ross, but Ross becoming Red Hulk is played up like it is supposed to be a grand crescendo and epic reveal. The problem with that is everyone saw Red Hulk in every single promotional material Marvel Studios released.
Surprisingly enough, Red Hulk did not deliver. A lot of this goes back to the bad VFX in the majority of this movie, so the build up felt empty. As soon as it started, it was over. Unfortunately that goes for most of the movie. It had potential to be very good, but it had the short runtime of 1 hour and 58 minutes. In fact, this is the same for a lot of recent MCU movies. There has been not only a shortage of MCU movies in the last 3 years, but they’ve been incredibly short compared to the movies that were released in the Infinity Saga. This causes the movie to be very rushed, and the story does not feel fleshed out nearly enough. These movies need to be longer, because if they’re not, people who somehow haven’t checked out already from the MCU will check out then.
Overall, “Captain America: Brave New World” is not all that it should’ve, and could’ve been. It was too short, had poor VFX, less than serviceable acting, and it all was supposed to be for this epic build up that never happens. However, this movie teases some good in the future. Sam Wilson is rebuilding the Avengers, either the Fantastic Four or X-Men were teased in the post credit scene, and it is always so good to see Captain America’s shield flying through the air. Because of all of that, “Captain America: Brave New World” gets a very disappointing 51/100.
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