After meeting with newly elected U.S. President Thaddeus Ross, Sam finds himself in the middle of an international incident. He must discover the reason behind a nefarious global plot before the tr...
If it wasn’t for my mom, I probably would’ve sat out “Captain America: New World Order” in its entirety but as is, I can confirm three things. One: Brave New World despite the implications behind it is still a stupid title. Two: It’s basically a backdoor Incredible Hulk sequel in disguise.
And three: I keep surprising myself with how consistently discordant this films continue to be.
God, do I feel bad for Julius Onah. You feel snippets of the direction he intended for this to go but for all that ambition, there’s an airless husk in its place; strictly on autopilot 87% of the time with a lot of fake difficulty and hammer-headed subtlety for a film that’s supposed to invite such conversations. And the worst part is it wasn’t even his fault; he was taken off the project once the reshoots went down so he wasn’t even given that much control over the project to begin with.
So much about this movie suffers due to the constant round-the-clock delays and reshoots from behind the scenes but outside the obvious, the production design is the other black eye amongst all the dross. It’s like every single set utilized shrinks in efficiency the longer the film progresses, looking more and more like a green screen and the lower budget is on full display every waking moment. Smaller in scope and scale and unreasonably confined and contained for a Captain America movie or even the Falcon and Winter Solider series, we get nothing close to the concise claustrophobia a thriller normally provides; there’s nothing very grounded about it.
Calling the presentation milquetoast wouldn’t be right but neither would be simply calling it rhinoceros dong; I’ll settle for saying tiresome. Very much structured as a homage first, soap opera second and mopey thriller dead last, the ineffectual film structure offers the illusion of free-flowing narrative only to undercut itself at most angles. One can say the cinematography is mostly passable but it quickly loses points for the otherwise sludgy, semi-colorless photography and barely any shred of visual storytelling while the clunky editing is reminiscent of a straight-to-streaming feature.
Guess I can praise the pacing for keeping its head on a swivel and not losing itself in the madness it creates for itself but when it still feels like its running at 1.25x speed, tight pacing, this is not. Aping the tonal shifts from Winter Solider has both egregious and glaringly corny results, costumes are aesthetically appealing but thematically underwhelming, visual effects are half stellar, half laughable, only two separate music tracks come to mind while the rest of the score just blends in, fading into obscurity and while the action sequences surprisingly are above average in comparison to what we’re used to seeing, the decent hand-to-hand combat can’t make up for lack of rhythm and weightless tension.
Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford deliver much better performances than the script required from them; in actuality, everyone exceeded expectations as far as physical dramatic tension and poise while the actual acting varies. But they’re all let down by rather one-note, inconsistent writing in their characters or just straight-up accidental character assassination, and nobody is safe.
No, the dialogue isn’t that good either. Mimicking Aaron Sorkin like this doesn’t do much good.
So, this narrative doesn’t just pull ideas and concepts from Winter Soldier, Civil War, Eternals or Incredible Hulk but instead, cobbles together a Frankenstitch of other MCU material, anime references and a metric crap ton of sterilizing needles to strip this of nuance or agency, becoming a vague mimicry of ’70s paranoid thrillers. Structuring this as a Saturday morning cartoon might have been the easy way out of landing in hot water with certain people but all it really does is exacerbate the movies biggest sin of all: numbing away its identity before surgically removing it. Every single scene is specifically designed to, if not spoon-feed us in the most shallow, simplistic ways, then timidly scream of its own self-importance while shoving beeswax in their ears.
Whether you ignore the links to previous MCU flicks or not, so much of this story might seem easy to follow on the surface but the second you turn your brain on, it turns convoluted yet mindlessly simple really fast; very fragmented and choppy with no tangible stakes behind anything. All the uncomfortable truths, psychedelic sense of brutality, present-tense topicality from previous Captain America movies is but a distant relic now while feckless platitude is in its place, actively erasing and/or ignoring any traces of the social hot-button issues right in our faces to avoid engaging with any sort of drama. The story is designed to hit close to home yet steadfastily refuses to correspond or engage with any of its ideas regarding the reluctant support for an anti-black system, its pro-militaristic propaganda glazing and even repeating said theme of where to draw the line scrutiny for global security and individual freedom.
There is no unified goal or strong central idea to carry through from Point A to B. Many of the characters don’t have arcs that anchor to any of its themes and whether by artistic design or corporate mandate, its failure to balance business and pleasure exposes this feature as spineless.
For gods sake, the political undertones in this story was right under our noses: two men of color try to save the world from an old, corrupt white man with deep, festering rage and no emotional regulation skills- his inner demons hellbent on punishing the world for his own hatred. Cloaked in nationalist rhetoric and symbolic red, he embodies a Faustian bargain- sacrificing his soul for survival and sowing global chaos in a bid to maintain whatever sense of control and power he has left…..while secretly being controlled by an evil tech guy from behind the scenes. It was laid out, scribbled in crayon, ripe for the pickings but that’s not what it wants. It wants normalcy, to be everything for everybody but that near-symbiotic need for relevance and security means they’ll exclude more voices than they’ll elevate.
How can you be a voice for the voiceless if you’re unwilling to speak out?
In what might possibly be the most infuriating MCU movie I’ve seen since Love and Thunder, the fourth Captain America movie is charged with committing identity fraud: being frustratingly formulaic, clogged and stripped naked of its predecessors present-tense topicality AND actively playing safe with aesthetic politics for the sake of avoiding conflict.
