When Chris Evans was cast to play Captain America, there was already a sentiment in the air that Marvel should have chosen someone who better represented the multi-ethnic nature of the United States, especially for a character who functions as that country’s mascot to the world. You can’t have the role played by more than one person, of course – not unless you’re making an art film rather than a superhero movie – but did that person have to be so, I don’t know, white? Such a faithful recreation of how the character was originally conceived in the comic books, way back in 1940?
Fifteen years later, we’re finally woke enough to make it happen. And that’s a good thing, for most people. Oh yeah, there will always be those like Donald Trump, who would probably fat-thumb a tweet demanding they recast for Captain America: Brave New World, replacing Anthony Mackie with, I don’t know, Kid Rock, even though the movie released in cinemas yesterday. Then again, Trump and his ilk gave up on the progressive snowflakes in Hollywood years ago, and we’re better off without him, and them.
The newest Captain America movie, and the staggering 35th entry in the Marvel Cinema Universe, is indeed the debut of Sam Wilson, the erstwhile Falcon, in the role of Cap, which Julius Onah’s movie does its best to make seem like always belonged to him. Of course, the man who was once Steve Rogers’ sidekick, who has now handed over his own sidekick role to a new Falcon (Joaquin Torres, played by Danny Ramirez), will always be compared by others, and perhaps most of all by himself, to the man who originated the character. However, Onah’s film does him the service of sparing us a lot of excess commentary about it, maybe assuming it’s more a fait accompli, considering that Wilson first stepped into Cap’s shoes in the Marvel TV series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier back in 2021.
Who knows what year it is in this movie’s timeline – which, thankfully, is the only timeline discussed – and what role the blip that killed half the world’s population, before bringing them back, plays in our conception of the time that’s passed. But whatever year it is, Sam Wilson has been doing the job for a bit. His old frenemesis – yes that’s a word, even if I just made it up – Thaddeus Ross has just been elected president. You may remember him from five previous movies in the MCU and played by William Hurt, who passed in 2022. Who would have guessed there’d be a world where Harrison Ford took William Hurt’s sloppy seconds?
But indeed, the 82-year-old Ford inherits the role and will be presiding over a period of tension involving a new land mass in the Indian Ocean called Celestial Island, last seen in Eternals, which is home to a new element even more powerful that Wakandan vibranium. That’s adamantium, and if that name sounds familiar, it’s because Wolverine’s claws are made of it. (Yes, this seems like the soft introduction to the MCU mainstream of the star of last year’s sort of side project, Deadpool & Wolverine.) Nations are arguing over who stole whose share of it, and clandestine missions to recover it from secret deals between shadowy figures may or may not implicate Ross’ new government.
The new Cap gets involved because his friend, a super soldier called Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), may have been set up in an assassination attempt on Ross, though he has no memory of what came over him and it seems unlikely the idea originated with him. (Even though the government did lock him up and experiment on him for, oh, 30 years.) Cap has to figure out what’s going on while evading attempts to kill him by Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito) and a math genius with a partially externalised brain (Tim Blake Nelson), with the new Falcon and an Israeli-born security specialist for the president (Shira Haas) at his side.
Captain America: Brave New World resembles the old Captain America movies, and virtually every other MCU movie, in terms of basic structure and the big epic fight scene at the end in which the stakes are through the roof. (Though it does not share the series’ tendency to give us a mid-credits sequence, opting only for the sequence after the credits.) However, even involving the U.S. president as a main character and an alien land mass in the Indian Ocean, the movie benefits from feeling like a separate episode in the larger narrative, even as it sets the stage for the next phase of the MCU. If those movies took the super serum that made Steve Rogers indestructible, then this is more a human-sized, Sam Wilson-style film, as Sam’s only advantages over adversaries are his gadgets and his ability to frisbee that shield at them.
While that’s good in a sense, and this movie does not even crack the two-hour mark, it also means there is a certain lack of vision to it. Other than the quite refreshing decision to introduce a black Captain America, Onah’s film doesn’t have as much going in the rest of its ambition. And though the film isn’t heavy on its feet, neither is it making much of an attempt to be funny, even though that mode is totally suited to Mackie’s talents as a performer.
So the film has the “caught in the middle” quality of trying not to do too much, while also still doing too much in the expected ways. The movie’s worst kept “secret” is the third adversary revealed in the third act, a red menace who features heavily in the trailers, which embodies the traditional payoffs of a Marvel movie. So even when the film is not trying to do too much for long stretches, we know the hulking impact of the special effects, so to speak, will eventually give this movie its flagship set piece.
Maybe it’s not so bad that this is a “mid” Captain America movie. It doesn’t hang around long enough to wear on you, and Mackie is as ingratiating as ever. Near the end, Sam Wilson tells another character that it’s all about the timing, and though he goes on to express what he’s literally talking about, the unspoken message is that Sam Wilson’s, and Anthony Mackie’s, time has finally come. Chris Evans was a great Captain America, but all these years later, we finally have the corrective we need, and maybe should have gotten in the first place.
Captain America: Brave New World opened yesterday in cinemas.