REEL | Anthony Mackie Activates 'Captain America: Brave New World'

"Help me rebuild the Avengers."

Marvel Studios

Falcon sidekick Anthony Mackie officially takes over the superhero mantle in the long-awaited but bottom-tier Marvel sequel, Captain America: Brave New World, directed by Julius Onah. After many production delays, creative overhauls, and lengthy reshoots, the new Cap uncovers another deep criminal conspiracy seeded within the deepest depths of the now alien invasion-averse U.S. government.

It's hard to imagine a more jumbled mess for the fourth Captain America solo outing than the extremely clunky revenge plot (credited to five screenwriters) laid out that requires endless monologues of complex explanations. What's so strange about Brave New World is its odd concern about readdressing dangling threads left from two of Marvel's least popular shared-universe entries, The Incredible Hulk and Eternals. One of the few bright spots has Danny Ramirez taking over the Falcon role as the new energetic buddy pairing in a film featuring increasingly dire consequences.

The relatively wasted trio of Giancarlo Esposito, Tim Blake Nelson, and Harrison Ford (taking over the role of Thunderbolt Ross from William Hurt who died in 2022) co-star as a gaggle of disparate villains, Sidewinder (the leader of the snake-themed Serpent Society), the big-brained Leader, and the compromised new U.S. President who then transforms into the Red Hulk. None of them get to really shine outside of a few shoehorned emotional moments from Ford as the manipulated Ross. His version of the character is one of the wilder conceptions of presidential power on screen seen in a while—imagine an odd amalgamation of both President Biden and Tr*mp.

Onah's sequel tries far too hard to rehash the dangling global political machinations from The Winter Soldier and the perfect revenge plan of Civil War that culminates in a non-sensical contemporary Marvel recreation of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the unlikeliest of military allies in Japan, which famously was forced to disband most of its defenses after WWII and relies on the U.S. for security, as the forced naval combatant.

Sadly, instead of using Mackie's natural charisma to wrap a worthy superhero buddy action movie around him, audiences are saddled with a stale replica of the previous (much superior) Chris Evans-led incarnations with poor CGI, badly choreographed fight sequences, and confusing politics nobody cares about.


More | YVArcade / Indiewire / Polygon / ScreenCrush