“I should have just taken the serum,” says Sam Wilson in Captain America: Brave New World. His refusal to turn himself into a super-soldier like his predecessor Steve Rogers is a point of pride; it’s also a liability in a world filled with what another character refers to as “enhanced individuals.” This version of Captain America can’t do much against an opponent amped up on Gamma radiation, and he knows it.
The idea of a superhero suffering from performance anxiety—if not impostor syndrome—is resonant right now, as cracks appear in Marvel’s gleaming foundations. The signature image of Avengers: Endgame, with rows and rows of good guys staring down faceless CGI hordes, was the perfect emblem for a front-running brand defined by synergy and abundance. (“You wanted more?” asks Benedict Wong’s Sorcerer Supreme not so rhetorically.) Yet, in some ways, Thanos had it right all along. Even in 2018, there were too many Avengers to keep track of. Somebody had to be expendable.
Marvel’s endgame has always been to delay the endgame as long as possible. Now, they seem to be in the process of self-checkmate. Last year, Louis D’Esposito, the co-president of Marvel Studios, was quoted in Empire admitting that it had been “a rough time” for the company: “Maybe when you do too much, you dilute yourself a little bit.” Such self-reflection is admirable, but the problems go beyond oversaturation: The weaknesses are in the movies themselves. Trying to remember a genuinely resonant image or line of dialogue in Shang-Chi, The Marvels, and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania makes for an arduous stroll down memory lane; not even hiring Sam Raimi to play his greatest hits could make Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness feel less obligatory. What does it say that the most memorable Marvel properties of the past few years have been MCU-adjacent flops such as Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter, which have gone viral not in spite of their badness but as a direct result? It is no longer Morbin’ time. It may never be again.
The exception to this downward spiral was 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, a spectacularly obnoxious but conceptually shrewd movie that pandered to its edgelord demographic while deftly summarizing a mainstream vibe shift. Like Thanos, the film’s villains were efficiency experts with a mandate to downsize their own intellectual property. The difference was that, from his side of the fourth wall, our hero could sort of see where they were coming from. “You’re coming in at kind of a low point,” Deadpool cheerfully explains to his old pal Wolverine, who’s none too pleased to be resurrected after getting a humane send-off in Logan. Deadpool’s getting at something true about the cyclical nature of empires: They’re never really built to last, even when they’ve been reinforced with vibranium.
After being delayed for a year by extensive reshoots, Captain America: Brave New World—originally subtitled New World Order until that phrase proved a bit too sensitive—has come limping into view as the punch line to Deadpool’s joke. Not that anybody is laughing, exactly. Advance word was that Julius Onah’s film had suffered from a troubled production; a new behind-the-scenes report published in Vulture confirmed it, quoting an unnamed crew member as saying “everybody on the crew knew that [this] was not going to be a good film.” That’s blunt, but it’s also an understatement. If Brave New World isn’t the worst movie ever released under the Marvel banner, it might just be the dullest—a humorless, grayed-out vision of contractual obligation featuring actors who look like they’d rather be anywhere else. Say what you will about Madame Web, but there was something charming about its pulpy, unpretentious ineptitude. Between its omnipresent and hilarious ADR and Dakota Johnson’s inability to open a Pepsi can, Madame Web is an endearingly surreal viewing experience (one I have personally seen twice). Brave New World is for completists only. It isn’t camp. It isn’t kitsch. It isn’t even a noble failure that goes down swinging. It’s just feeble, a movie that forgot to take the serum.
Usually when a big-budget movie like this goes wrong, it’s the director who ends up getting thrown under the bus. That’s not fair to Onah, whose last movie, Luce, about a Black student who runs afoul of his school’s administration, was full of bristling and contradictory ideas. His recruitment here indicates that Brave New World was supposed to be one of Marvel’s “serious” movies, and the setup feints at political complexity. It begins at the presidential inauguration of the feared and respected U.S. military commander General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross, who was played in 2008’s The Incredible Hulk by the late William Hurt behind a righteous mustache; we learn that in order to level up to the Oval Office, Ross—now played by Harrison Ford—had to ditch the soup strainer or risk the ire of focus groups everywhere.
Ross’s platform is “togetherness.” Apparently, there are a lot of single-issue voters out there. His biggest administrative dilemma is what to do about Tiamut, the “celestial island” that surfaced in the Indian Ocean at the end of Eternals, and which contains the sort of bountiful, valuable natural resources that could bring global allies to the brink of war. Hoping to shed his image as a warmonger—and in doing so, to redeem himself in the eyes of the daughter he alienated several movies/decades ago—Ross plans to share Tiamut’s adamantium with the rest of the free world. His presentation to a group of world leaders plays, amusingly, like an infomercial, or maybe a Marvel Studios shareholders meeting.
These plans for unity are waylaid following an assassination attempt at the White House with Sam in the house. The shooter is Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), the towering Korean War veteran—and “forgotten Captain America” introduced in the Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. As a former military guinea pig who was held in prison for 30 years, Isaiah has every reason to want revenge, but his confusion after pulling the trigger hints that he may be a Manchurian candidate. Sam is determined to clear his mentor’s name, which means going off the grid with the help of the next would-be Falcon, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), and figuring out where the administration has gotten compromised. Between skirmishes with a freelance hitman played by Giancarlo Esposito and visits to a top secret military facility—plot points that could both come from a game of Marvel Mad Libs—Sam uncovers (wait for it) a larger conspiracy designed to destabilize the ruling geopolitical empire for good.
It took five screenwriters to produce the script for Brave New World, which is light on inventive twists or memorable dialogue. What it does have is a lot of exposition, which is parcelled out mostly through impromptu briefings. That’s what storytelling has become in the MCU: an extended game of catch-up favoring viewers whose security clearance is a yearly subscription to a streaming service. For all the hand-wringing about international aggression and mutually assured destruction, what’s really at stake is not the price of adamantium or the threat of nuclear war, but the maintenance of continuity. What does it say that the movie’s not-so-secret Big Bad is basically a statistician whose M.O. is calculating probabilities? We’re supposed to hate him for trying to weaponize percentages against the good guys, but he’s actually the perfect avatar for a studio whose brain trust has historically gotten rich by hedging their bets.
If there’s a sympathetic figure in this quagmire, it’s Anthony Mackie, a charismatic actor who’s been waiting a decade for his above-the-title moment. While promoting the movie in Rome, he raised eyebrows by telling an interviewer, “Captain America represents a lot of different things and I don’t think the term, you know, ‘America’ should be one of those representations.” While Mackie ended up walking things back by saying he was a “proud American” and that he supported the troops, his observation connects to Brave New World’s seriously janky politics. One reason the first Captain America worked was because it successfully yoked its hero’s sense of moral clarity to a throwback World War II narrative; the ’70s-paranoid-thriller qualities of The Winter Soldier were overstated but relatively fresh the first time around. At this point, whatever mileage there was to get out of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra has been exhausted, and Sam’s idealism makes him look less like a paragon than a sap.
It’s never clear why Sam remains faithful to a government that kept a Black war hero locked away for so long, or why he tries to see the best in Ross, who spent his career trying to keep the Avengers off the board. He’s told at one point that his optimism makes him an “inspiration,” which sounds nice, especially coming from Sebastian Stan in “just here for the day” mode. It’s hard to take, though, in a cynically packaged narrative that’s about little more than upholding the status quo. (The peripheral presence of Black Widow operative Ruth Bat-Seraph, played by Shira Haas—who’s never referred to by her comic book moniker of Sabra but is directly identified as Israeli—has also been a point of controversy, with protestors calling for a boycott at the film’s premiere.)
Vulture’s article refers to Harrison Ford being unhappy on set, which is hardly news, but his frustration bleeds into his performance as Ross. He hasn’t been given much to play. His entire role is waiting for the other shoe to drop, or rather to explode when a big red foot bursts through it. It’s not a spoiler alert to reveal that Ross contains multitudes—Brave New World’s entire ad campaign depended on the promise of a Red Hulk. The image of an elected official rampaging through Washington, destroying everything he touches while waiting for somebody to talk him down—or blow him up—has some symbolic currency at the moment. Accidental prescience isn’t the same thing as satire, though, and Brave New World doesn’t commit to the metaphor in any sustained way. A funnier movie would have featured Red Hulk signing executive orders.
Last weekend, a friend of mine in Toronto went viral when he wondered if film critics should even have to review Marvel releases anymore. It was a good question: Brave New World made nearly $90 million domestically on opening weekend, which is considerably less than its predecessors, but still enough to suggest a certain impenetrable layer of critic-proofing. Though, at this point, it’s less about criticism—or even consumer reporting—than keeping tabs on something immense as it wobbles around on rubber legs. The recurring image of Tiamut, massive and half-submerged as various factions try to strip-mine it, is poetic in a way that doesn’t totally feel intended. It’s like a Marvel movie taking place among its own ruins.
It’s a Marvel tradition that its movies all have (at least) two endings: a final sequence and a stinger that, in theory, justifies sitting through 10 minutes of end credits. Brave New World lowers the bar on both fronts in a way that somehow suggests both a guilty conscience and complete disdain. There’s a conversation between Sam and Joaquin about the pressures of being a hero, and the need to rise to meet opportunities. It’s almost as if Marvel is promising to do better next time. The stinger, meanwhile, features a locked-down villain vowing to send for reinforcements. “There will be others,” says the bad guy ominously. He seems to be speaking on behalf of his parent company. The existential threat—to the world and the audience—is already here.