“Captain America: Brave New World” is the first Marvel movie in six months — but more than that, it’s the first since 2022, the year of “Thor: Love and Thunder” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” to build itself around a superhero you’d categorize as Marvel Classic. Those three years define an era when many began to wonder if comic-book-movie culture — or, at least, the thrill of it — was over. Last summer, the massive box-office success of “Deadpool & Wolverine” ($636 million domestic) might seem to have laid that question to rest. Yet with the Marvel Cinematic Universe encompassing 35 films, there is now a daunting repetition built into it. The issue of potential superhero fatigue hovers over a new “Captain America” film far more than it did before.
With so much backstory, including the Disney+ miniseries “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” (2021), now woven into the Avengers saga, “Brave New World” is a movie you may go into wondering if you’ve done enough homework. And watching Anthony Mackie launch his first solo flight as Sam Wilson, who has taken over the Captain American mantle from Chris Evans’s Steve Rogers, you may be struck by how much the character now seems like a scaled-down superhero for an MCU whose glory days are behind it.
Wilson’s Captain America lacks the serum-enhanced invincibility that defined Rogers. He’s a hand-to-hand combat badass, but far more dependent on his shield and wingsuit, both of which are made of vibranium. You could say that that makes him a hero more comparable to, say, Iron Man (though Tony Stark’s principal weapon was Robert Downey Jr.’s motormouth), and Wilson’s all-too-mortal quality comes through in the sly doggedness of Mackie’s when-you’re-number-two-you-try-harder performance. But on a gut level we’re thinking, “Wasn’t the earlier Captain America more…super?”
All that said, it’s that very earthbound quality that roots “Brave New World,” a movie that takes its tone from Mackie’s tough, taut, slightly downbeat cool-cat presence. The film, while intricately connected to all that’s come before (epic imprisonments! adamantium! Sebastian Stan!), works well enough as a vigorous, prosaic, more-stand-alone-than-not adventure that balances shield-bashing, sky-zipping action with the elements of a gritty geopolitical thriller. This isn’t one of those Marvel movies that fans had begun to trash for getting swallowed up by CGI and strangled by too many multiverse tentacles to disentangle. It’s superhero meatloaf and potatoes served with just enough competence and dash not to feel like reheated leftovers.
Early on, Wilson is invited to the White House, where Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, the former Army general and newly elected U.S. President (played by Harrison Ford, taking over for the late William Hurt), is hosting the Celestial Island World Summit, which marks a major global discovery (of a Celestial mass in the middle of the Indian Ocean). Our tersely honorable hero and the sneaky, combustible Ross share a thorny past. Wilson is trying to mend old wounds by bringing along Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbley), his old comrade and a former super soldier who was imprisoned and experimented on for 30 years.
At the White House, though, Isaiah suddenly rises up, along with four gunmen, to assassinate the president. They fail, but a look at the surveillance footage reveals that each assassin, including Isaiah, had a cellphone light shine in his face. They’ve been triggered by a mysterious entity, and Wilson, with Danny Ramirez’s snark-lite Falcon at his side (he’s like Robin to Cap’s Batman), sets out to find the culprit.
The director, Julius Onah (“The Cloverfield Paradox”), unpacks the conspiracy with straightforward gusto. It all leads to Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), a cellular biologist contaminated with the blood of Bruce Banner, which has turned him into a toxic green troll who wears his brains on the outside. If Sterns had hatched a good old Marvel masterplan (like, you know, trying to annihilate everyone in the multiverse), he’d just be a rerun. But he’s actually got an entertainingly loopy idea: to goad President Ross, his former captor, into a military face-off with Japan over the ownership of a cache of adamantium. The trick is to tease out Ross’s anger, his inner bully.
We’re used to seeing movie presidents who are stalwart ciphers, but Harrison Ford plays Ross like Ronald Reagan with anger-management issues. He invests the character with a gravelly authority that keeps the lid (barely) on his simmering instability. We keep waiting for Ford’s inner grump to bust out into rage, and his chameleonic performance keeps changing colors, until Ross transmogrifies into the Red Hulk, at which point the film launches into its conventional echt-Marvel Exciting Climactic Duel.
I wouldn’t call any of this “topical,” yet there are coincidental semi-resonances. Sterns’ mind-control techniques embody the grand depersonalization of AI (hence the film’s subtitle). And the way the old world order crumbles into a new world disorder connects, however tangentially, with the WTF tone of President Trump’s attempt to remake global politics. As Ruth Bat-Seraph, an Israeli former Black Widow who was a Mossad agent in the comics and is now the president’s head of security (which hasn’t stopped pro-Palestinian protesters from objecting to her presence), Shira Haas is like Billie Eilish playing Mata Hari. And Tim Blake Nelson gooses the camp dastardliness of a villain who’s like the Phantom of the MCU. (The post-credits teaser reveals that he’s not done.) “Captain America: Brave New World” is a reasonably diverting time filler that feels like what it is: a pit stop in the MCU’s rebooting-the-Avengers strategy. What’s old is not new again. But it’s just fun enough again.
