Captain America: Brave New World, the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, is releasing in theaters later this week and reviews for the flick have gone live online. The consensus? Not great!
While most critics praised Harrison Ford’s performance as Thaddeus Ross as well as Anthony Mackie’s return as Sam Wilson—now Captain America—many found the movie’s script bloated and confusing script and its action bland, madking it hard for reviewers to enjoy this latest MCU film. Worse, it doesn’t seem to commit to any message in a time when a story about a power-mad president seems like something people would want to watch.
Tom Jorgensen, writing for IGN, found the action to be uninspired and further complained that director Julius Onah “doesn’t find much footing with the blockbuster material. And that’s before we get to the film’s frustratingly cloying ‘Can’t we all just get along?’ political message, which begs us to remember to see the good in each other while doing relatively little to call out what the inverse actually looks like.”
Frank Scheck at The Hollywood Reporter called the movie “perfunctory” and criticized the film’s “pedestrian screenplay” which is credited to five different people. “Humor is in severely short supply, with the result being that Mackie’s reliable charisma doesn’t seem much in evidence. You feel bad for him; finally given the chance to prove he can fill the shoes of Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, he’s let down by the writers,” explained Scheck.
Over at Deadline, Pete Hammond was a bit more kind to the film and seemed to enjoy it more than some other critics. He praised Mackie, acknowledging he had a “tough act to follow” after Chris Evans left the Cap role. “Watching Mackie taking Sam Wilson into the big leagues is a game effort with room to grow,” concluded the critic.
But overall, critics didn’t enjoy this latest MCU installment. Captain America: Brave New World currently has a 49 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, making it one of the worst-reviewed MCU movies around. And even most of the positive reviews catalogued on Rotten Tomatoes are more faint praise and backhanded compliments than full endorsements of Brave New World. The movie, critics suggest, feels like it’s trying to tie up multiple loose plot threads from past movies people have forgotten (really, did anyone care about the giant god hand seen in Eternals?) and doing so in a confusing and boring way.
Germain Lussier at Gizmodo/io9 summed it pretty well: “Basically, very little in this movie is ‘brave’ or ‘new.’ More like ‘tried’ and ‘true.’”
Bilge Ebiri for Vulture suggested that while you can see what Marvel was going for with Brave New World—something more grounded and political—it just doesn’t work. He writes: “Somewhere along the way, the whole thing appears to have spun out of control into the confused and shallow mess that we have before us. It’s enough to make one wonder if, given the level of interference and second-guessing involved, Marvel could ever make such a movie. Victims of their own success, they’ve somehow turned their vaunted production enterprise into a giant slop machine.”
There’s a growing sense in the reviews and online reactions I read that Marvel and Disney have run out of ideas and are now spinning their wheels and hoping cameos from MCU movies made a decade ago will keep fans excited. Hopefully Fantastic Four can turn the ship around.
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