Captain America: Brave New World
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
The movie that kept getting taken apart and reassembled in public. Brave New World went through multiple rounds of reshoots and a title change, and the released cut plays like a committee arguing with itself: a political thriller about a new Captain America navigating a White House conspiracy, with the thrills sanded down to the franchise’s standard beats. Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson finally gets his movie and spends it surrounded by plot machinery.
What works: Mackie and Danny Ramirez’s Falcon have an easy wingman chemistry, the opening Mexican street mission is the film’s one clean action sequence, and Harrison Ford’s President Ross, a man trying to outrun his own gamma soaked past, gives the story its tragic engine. The White House assassination scene, a brainwashed ambush mid speech, stages well. The Isaiah Bradley mind control subplot carries the film’s best acting in five quiet minutes.
What doesn’t: the plot’s molecular logic about a Celestial island and red serum handwaves its way forward, Tim Blake Nelson’s return as the Leader is a wet firework after eighteen years of buildup, and the Red Hulk climax is a brief airport scuffle staged at half speed. The film is neither the paranoid thriller it keeps gesturing at nor the crowd roaster it needed to be.
Our score: 5/10, watchable and faintly sad about it.
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