In Captain America: Brave New World, Sam Wilson has assumed the mantle of Captain America and is trying to do right by working within the system. After all the election of President Ross has allowed for new allies. On the eve of a peace treaty over Celestial Island, a terror attack occurs putting everyone on the brink. Sam not only has to find a way to step up and restore peace, but figure out who really is masterminding the plots.
Like nearly every movie, the success of the picture rides on the screenplay and unfortunately for viewers of this film, that is the movie’s greatest weakness. By the end of this film, I almost feel like I need to reconsider my thoughts on The Falcon and the Winter Solider, a show I did not particularly care for. Captain America: Brave New World feels like a mix of studio overreach and malaise. We spend significant chunks of the movie dancing around prickly topics in a way the show was not shy about, giving Sam a pretty rote mission to be involved in compared to stopping John Walker, and following characters/moments that are important to the MCU yes, but don’t mean much to Sam, rendering much of the film inert. Most every thing here feels like reheated nachos of Steve and Sam’s best hits. Mistrust of a big government official? Check. Evil mastermind behind the plot? Check. Wingman? Check. A Black Widow-esque character? Check.
Compare this to some other MCU solo films. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers has his world upended via Hydra and Bucky. In Thor: Ragnarok, the sins of Thor’s father come back to haunt Thor. In Black Window, Natasha has to not only get her family together but go against the Red Room where she was reborn. In all of these examples, the plots of these films hinge on the personal journeys of the characters and are made all the stronger for it. There’s virtually nothing in this film that feels worth to even hold the hem of those film’s garments when it comes to plot structure and it nearly cripples the film. If Sam’s journey is to figure out how to fight within the system, it would have been more pertinent to have him more involved with it at every facet and have the roads lead to decisions he had actively made.
What is perhaps most disappointing to me as a viewer is that there is lots of stuff here that I have been begging the MCU to entertain. The geopolitical implications of the Emergence from The Eternals has barely been touched and this film makes it a large crux of the story. Additionally, we also get a beat right at the beginning of the movie to have people mention just how not nice of a guy Thaddeus Ross is, something I’ve literally been screaming from the rooftops for someone to point out. But in this film they seem to work against the journey of Sam Wilson. He’s not a statesman or being used as enough of a political pawn to really matter in that arena, and ultimately, there’s not much here that feels unique or germane to Sam Wilson. He’s incredibly adrift in the narrative and arguably the third most important character in his own film.
This sucks because Sam Wilson is a character that I genuinely like and Anthony Mackie does well to show just how much the shield weighs him down but also encourages him to action. However, I think that we are now 2/2 in big projects featuring the character which twist and bend in order to make character do what they need them to do vs feeling organic.
This is perhaps witnessed most acutely with Isaiah Bradley. Carl Lumbly, much like he did in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, absolutely walks away with the story, even as the narrative tries to work against what has already been established. Without giving away any pertinent information, it remains unbelievable the things this character goes through and yet ends where he does.
All of this is unfortunate because I do think Julius Onah does have an eye for staging action in a way that builds character; we can see just how different Sam fights in comparison to Steve down to the speed and framing of them. He doesn’t revel in brutality but there’s a bit of street level fighter in how he’s staging these things that I found appealing. The framing of the aerial battles is also incredibly fun.
But ultimately, the film never really took off for me. Captain America: Brave New World is neither cohesive enough or messy enough to really satisfy any of its objectives. Captain America is a strong enough character to get into his own mess, it’s incredibly disappointing that Sam Wilson and his film feel like the janitors of the MCU instead, cleaning up where other films failed to do so.
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