Captain America: Brave New World review - The ‘incomprehensible’ new movie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe

Unless you’ve been paying strict attention for 15 years, Captain America: Brave New World is incomprehensible. Photo / Marvel Studios

Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford star in the latest addition to the Marvel canon.

Captain America: Brave New World is, by official count, the 35th movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that began in 2008 with Iron Man.

It’s also the fifth in the series of interconnected storylines known as MCU’s Phase 5, which itself is the middle instalment of the three-phase, 17-film Multiverse Saga, which also includes 20 dedicated TV series that have aired or will air on the Disney Plus streaming platform, of which the most relevant to the new film is 2021’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

What does all this mean for Captain America: Brave New World? Unless you’ve been paying strict attention for 15 years and/or are on the Disney/Marvel payroll, it means the movie is incomprehensible - pure canon fodder that indicates the MCU has finally disappeared up its own hindquarters.

In the process, a number of excellent actors are wasted on a pixel-pounding mishmash that at times approaches accidental Dada, so detached from human concerns and quotidian reality has this material become.

I know, I know, we go to superhero movies to escape reality - to dream of all the power we lack as mere mortals - but Brave New World still comes across as a humourless version of 1984’s The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, a cult satire that only pretended it was the 14th chapter of a 25-chapter serial. (At one point, a character in the new film asks, “Why is there a lab in a prison?” as he rushes through a secret lab in a prison, and I immediately thought of Jeff Goldblum’s deathless line from Buckaroo, “Why is there a watermelon there?”)

Sam Wilson, the superhero formerly known as the Falcon, has passed his mantle on to Joaquin Torres. Photo / Eli Adé, Marvel Studios

The good news is that Anthony Mackie has assumed the title role of Captain America, having been handed Cap’s shield by Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) at the end of Avengers: Endgame in 2019 (and having temporarily given it up in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but never mind).

Mackie is a spry, underrated actor with soulful eyes and a long résumé of stellar work in secondary roles, and his graduation to a multiplex-movie lead is welcome news.

It also gives us a Black Captain America, which is long overdue and which could be mined for a lot more cultural/historical resonance than this movie bothers with. (Maybe the TV series got around to it, but some of us have lives to live. And maybe Kendrick Lamar making an American flag from the bodies of Black men during the Super Bowl is as close as we’ll ever get.)

Oh, also: Harrison Ford is here as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, the superhero-hating general of the MCU who in the opening scenes of Brave New World has just been elected president, raising vain hopes that we might be getting a sequel to Air Force One.

Instead, the script (by five screenwriters) gives Ross a change of heart as he works to broker an international treaty governing the use of adamantium, a miracle element found only on the geological extrusion in the Indian Ocean known as the Celestial Mass.

Sam Wilson (Mackie), the superhero formerly known as the Falcon, has passed his mantle on to Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), a new Falcon who functions more like a jokey Robin to Wilson’s Batman. As Captain America, Wilson gets the vibranium shield but also keeps his wings, and the most hectic action scenes in Brave New World involve a lot of shield-fu and wing-fu, culminating in a soaring dogfight against Japanese and US fighter jets. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It’s easier to just tell you who’s in the movie than try to explain what happens in it. Here goes: Giancarlo Esposito spitting campy nails as the villainous Sidewinder; Carl Lumbly as Isaiah Bradley, a former super-soldier much mistreated by the US government; Tim Blake Nelson with a chewing-gum hairdo as supervillain Samuel Sterns, who (checks notes) is “a cellular biologist who was accidentally cross-contaminated with the blood of Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk”; Xosha Roquemore as the head of the president’s Secret Service team.

All do what they can with the dull, declamatory lines of dialogue they’re forced to spout.

Harrison Ford is here as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, the superhero-hating general of the MCU. Photo / Eli Adé, Eli Adé/Marvel Studios

The exception - aside from Mackie, who rises to the challenge of his character with a loose-limbed sense of purpose, and Ford, whom I’ll get to in a moment - is Shira Haas, the discovery of the Netflix series Unorthodox, as Ruth Bat-Seraph, a pint-size security expert and all-around badass. Can someone forget about Marvel canon and just make a movie about her? Haas has the oddball, pixel-proof charisma of an actual movie star, and when she’s on-screen, you’re not watching anybody else.

Well, there’s Ford, who gives the extremely conflicted role of President Ross his professional all and whose climactic scenes - which I will not do the dishounor of spoiling - are both hilariously stupid and the best visual metaphor for Donald Trump’s approach to governance the movies may ever give us. The president will probably like Captain America: Brave New World. As for Ford, I hope the old stoner is laughing all the way to the bank.

The director of this pig’s breakfast is Julius Onah, who made the dramatically cagey indie hit Luce (2019) and who here aces the assignment yet fails the class with an overreliance on exposition, choppily edited scenes of action and characters whose noble speeches have the emotional power of a generic greeting card.

Somewhere in Captain America: Brave New World (and, yes, that is Aldous Huxley you hear whirling in his grave) is a funky, subversive all-Black superhero movie, but the movie’s more interested in fan service and protecting corporate IP than in telling that story, or any story.

Will the Marvel faithful and general audiences rally to the captain’s side? Almost certainly; by some reports, Brave New World is the most anticipated release of 2025.

And if you’ve been committed to the MCU over all these years and iterations, you may find the new movie an acceptable entry in a never-ending saga. I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it.

Captain America: Brave New World is in New Zealand cinemas now.