Captain America: Brave New World

Captain America: Brave New World follows Sam Wilson (aka The Falcon) as he assumes the role of Captain America and deals with threats from the past, political intrigue, and superhuman threats.

Captain America: Brave New World Review

Disney, in general, and the MCU, specifically, have been in a downward spiral for quite some time. Despite the success of recent films like Deadpool and Wolverine and Inside Out 2, both of which benefitted from the goodwill garnered by their predecessors, The House of Mouse has all but lost its credibility with many of its would-be customers by choosing to churn out Leftist propaganda and social grooming experiments posing as entertainment created by activists posing as writers.

While rumors show signs that the multibillion-dollar monolith may have seen the light to one degree or another, only time will tell. Until their “new direction” has had a chance to take root, viewers will be left with the spliced-together flotsam that remains in the funnel. Welcome, Captain America: Brave New World.

According to those in the know, Brave New World was something of a nightmare behind the scenes. Multiple reshoots, loads of on-set tension, and an ever-bloating budget plagued the production, and it shows.

The editors ought to win an Oscar because as spliced together as the production is, with its uneven pacing and directionless storylines, the seams aren’t quite as visible as those in movies like Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom. That one had literal underwater billboards and a public address system expositing to inelegantly fill the narrative gaps left between rewrites and reshoots. Captain America: Brave New World at least lets the characters awkwardly vomit significant plot points.

Unfortunately, the film’s biggest problem isn’t its spasmatic Whack-O-Mole plots that randomly pop up and down throughout. The problem is more fundamental than that. The character doesn’t make any #### sense, at least not as a top-tier superhero charged with protecting the world. Created by Stan Lee in 1969, The Falcon has always been an incredibly generic pseudo-Batman without the mystique, the tragic origin, the Rogues Gallery, or even the cool-looking suit. But hey, he’s got a bird.

The first few phases of the MCU updated him (though they omitted the 2000s comic upgrade that made him the Aquaman of the Sky) and made him more of a poor man’s Iron Man. Still, it more or less worked because he was part of a team that could use him as support staff and reconnaissance, and didn’t have to rely on him to be the muscle who handled the big bad’s hand-to-hand.

Well, the writers (at least of some sections) of Brave New World clearly had no idea how to handle Sam. For while he may lament more than once in the film that he didn’t take the super soldier serum, this iteration of The Falcon doesn’t need it. He can now wholly defy the laws of physics, surviving g-forces that should turn him into pudding and walking off broken ribs and four-inch deep stab wounds to the chest, and he can even hold his own for a round or two with a rampaging Hulk. The whole thing makes for laughable action sequences that make the Rambo sequels appear reasonable.

As if that weren’t bad enough, Sam teams up with a neckless woman with a bad attitude who is the actual size of an 11-year-old girl. Yet, despite her pixie-like physique, she flips and kicks with the power of a freight train, and it looks utterly ridiculous.

Regrettably, it doesn’t stop there. Even the film’s large action set pieces suffer from the filmmakers’ inept creative decisions. In one of the many laugh-out-loud sequences, Sam genuinely surfs on a rocket, zooming along the ocean surface.

And how does one do justice to just how stupid the makeup and character design are for the main villain, Samuel Stern? You might remember him as the ethically questionable scientist who helped Ed Norton’s Bruce Banner in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. Played once again by Tim Blake Nelson, Stern was transformed by the Hulk’s blood into what appears to be a radioactive hemorrhoid. Unlike Bruce Banner, whose Gamma poisoning granted almost limitless physical strength, Stern was turned into a nigh omniscient super-genius whose brilliant mind takes nearly two decades to conceive a way to escape prison. Never mind that he is granted unlimited access to a fully functioning laboratory in which he designs and fabricates military weapons for the bulk of his incarceration.

The only thing holding Captain America: Brave New World together is Anthony Mackie’s talent and charisma, and while those may be significant, they aren’t even close to being enough to save this disaster of a film.

Captain America: Brave New World REVIEW