Main cast: Anthony Mackie (Sam Wilson/Captain America), Harrison Ford (President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross), Danny Ramirez (Joaquin Torres/Falcon), Shira Haas (Ruth Bat-Seraph), Carl Lumbly (Isaiah Bradley), Tim Blake Nelson (Dr Samuel Sterns), Xosha Roquemore (Leila Taylor), Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson (Copperhead), William Mark McCullough (Commander Dennis Dunphy), and Giancarlo Esposito (Sidewinder)
Director: Julius Onah

Well, the good news is that Captain America: Brave New World isn’t particularly awful for what it is.

In case folks haven’t heard, this movie had undergone a few rounds of major reshoots to the point that the final cut is allegedly practically a whole new movie from the original cut.

In a textbook example of dating itself using political references to “own the chuds”, the original version was said to have some very obvious Orange Man Bad elements hammered in a most heavy-handed way, right down to a scene that was supposed to mirror the January 6 incident. So… people walking peacefully around the place? Anyway, even their progressive test audience revolted during their test screenings, so each time a test screening garnered negative feedback, the film was sent back to the drawing room. 

Someone really wanted this movie to succeed, because the costs of reshoots would bloat the budget considerably, making it compulsory for this movie to make huge box office returns to make back its buck. So far, the box office earning is set around the same tier as Eternals and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, so yeah. Where’s the “At least we did better than The Marvels!” participation trophy?

So yes, this is Sam Wilson’s big screen debut as Captain BLMerica, sorry, Captain America, and sadly, he has a lot of baggage.

• Falcon was a sidekick that didn’t really have any big damn moments through the entire past MCU movies. 
• He was Steve Rogers’s BFF as well as the guy that wears a suit and flies. Oh, and he had a robot falcon too.
• The Falcon and Winter Soldier turned him into a stereotypical angry black man that flies against his character, or what little of it, and portrays the entire world of the MCU as a racist place—a complete 180 from all the movies that led up to this crappy Disney+ series.
• He doesn’t take the super serum because the program was apparently racist against black people, so he’s still a normal, if physically peak, human. 
• The original script carried heavily over the head-scratching “The MCU was racist! Thank god that our white savior Kevin Feige is finally making it a safe space for black people!” narrative, which leaks through now and then like some embarrassing floor stain that one overlooked while cleaning up the place before a big dinner party.
• Oh, and this movie is a sequel to The Incredible Hulk, a movie that the MCU is finally taking ownership of after over 15 years of pretending it doesn’t exist… but it has no Hulk, and the key characters from that movie acts like that movie sort of existed, but they forgot that Hulk is still around, so this movie is like a bizarre half-old school MCU half-post-Disney MCU that doesn’t fully come together in a cohesive manner.

So yeah, this movie is a thematic mess all around. Poor Sam Wilson never really had a chance after all the gross molestation committed on him by Kevin Feige’s band of incompetent DEI hires. 

The plot revisits General Thaddeus Ross, now the new President of the USA, and he is trying to get Sam to reform the Avengers.

Sam is still stuck with the “Oh, I am burdened by expectations! I am… uh, does that count as a personality?” song and dance, so he hesitates and dithers, while training under his Angry Black Man friend and having stints in Wakanda because black people fight better or something.

He also has a new groupie, Joaquin Torres, who claims that his biggest dream and ambition is to be Sam’s new sidekick. That’s so contrived, because Falcon didn’t really do anything, so Joaquin is practically saying that his favorite player in a football team is that guy that spends a bit of time wandering around the field, throwing a ball now and then, but no one really recalls his name. Anyway, he’s the new Falcon, thus making Mr Feige’s dream of racebending every white male character even truer. 

Oh, and remember that hand thing in Eternals? It’s now Celestial Island, and a new material, adamantium, is found so every main country in the world—not Russia and China, though, because they are cancelled in the MCU for not having enough DEI policies—is now scrambling for a way to bring Wolverine into the MCU. I hope Hugh Jackman isn’t waiting by the phone, as I have a strong suspicion that the new Wolverine will be an overweight black trans woman in a wheelchair. 

You’d think the whole adamant about adamantium thing will lead to some dramatic international intrigue, but sadly, the actual plot of the movie is Ross taking pills from his frenemy Dr Samuel Sterns, who is now practically an X-Man after being mutated from contact with Hulk blood, as he has a bad heart condition and only those pills can save him or something. However, Sterns has a plot brewing: he has been lacing those pills with increasing amounts of gamma radiation, to make Ross inadvertently Hulk out under stress.

Why is Sterns doing all this? To get Ross cancelled, of course, because Ross is mean to him. Seriously, this plot could very well be written by a vindictive terminally online X or BlueSky user and I have a suspicion that this could very well be case, given the current hiring practices of modern-day movie studios. 

So yes, this is one movie that really doesn’t have any important stakes or series-advancing plot. In fact, the “big” contribution of this movie is that it introduces the Thunderbolts and that’s about it, awesome. In other words, it’s an ad for the next MCU product to consoom, don’t ask questions. 

The plot is pretty dumb, and the action scenes are pretty lame with so many zillion cuts and close-ups to avoid showing me any actual action, pfft. Then again, I don’t know what these people expect when they hire an 80-plus-year-old man to play a role that would require him to do a little bit of physical activity, and he could barely lift his arm past his chest level. Most of the fight scenes see mooks deliberately aiming at Sam’s shield when the rest of his body is wide open, suggesting that there has been some cross-internal departmental exchange going on and Mr Feige has been borrowing fight scene choreographers from Lucasfilm. 

Yes, the story is full of holes and illogical plot points. Characters that are hyped in the trailers or pre-release buzz show up here for one or three scenes. Let me just say that fans of Giancarlo Esposito and Liv Tyler have better not watch this one expecting these actors to have much screentime because they really don’t.

However, given how this movie is a crude result of so many reshoots, I don’t think I can expect anything better. At least it isn’t as awfully patched together like The Marvels, for what that is worth. 

I can however expect better from that ex-Black Widow creature. Is she a dwarf? She’s very short. I believe she’s supposed to be an Israeli superhero as Kevin Feige’s way to show how stunning and bold he is YAASSS KWEEN SLAY THAT AIPAC CATWALK THIS MOVIE IS BEN SHAPIRO’S FAVORITE EVER, but given the current situation in Palestine, they had to redo all her scenes to give her a new identity.

Anyway, she is just… weird. Am I supposed to believe that the missing link from Snow White’s harem can take down groups of men much bigger than her with a few weak kicks and punches? 

However, for all its many faults, the biggest problem with this movie is that it is boring. Instead of focusing on high stakes, the movie makes the bizarre choice of boiling down everything into some petty grudge by a deranged lunatic. There are no slow build-up of tension and dramatic conflicts. Instead, there are many long, boring scenes that exist just to shove monologues into my face.

Indeed, there’s way too much telling, not enough showing. Everyone here keeps calling Sam “Captain America” and “Cap”, for example, to shove down my throat that this guy is now Captain America, when I’d prefer that they show me more grand, goddamn dramatic scenes of him being Captain America. Also, I get really annoyed when the people in this movie start telling me what they are talking, thinking, and doing. Do they think that the people watching this show are too busy on their phones to actually watch? Wait, don’t answer me as I’m sure that the answer will be depressing.

So, in the end, does this movie show me why Sam Wilson deserves to be Captain America, aside from the fact that it’s mandated by DEI?

No. The argument that he should be Captain America, not Bucky, because Bucky killed John F Kennedy no longer holds water here because the movie made Bucky a congressman here. What on earth? I’d like to think that this movie is making a jab at politicians, but I doubt the screenwriters are that clever. 

No. Poor Sam barely has any personality here, and to add insult to the injury, the plot is made for Hulk, not him. He doesn’t even have a big damn moment—without spoiling too much, let me just say that his true superpower appears to be Talk-You-to-Death-Jitsu. All this while wearing a suit that is more weaponized than Iron Man’s and more Wakanda’ed than Black Panther’s, mind you, and he’s whining that he’s just a normie human. He is like some brat pretending to be Captain America. Get the eff out of the room, little brat, and let the grown-ups be the hero.

Ultimately, this movie is a bit better than the recent low-tier MCU turds, but that’s because it’s too boring to inflict grievous insults on my intelligence like those other movies. 

On the bright side, this is the last of the MCU movies during the DEI-mania phase, so let’s see whether subsequent MCU would reverse things around or continue along its doomed path. I’d like to say that I am optimistic, but I’m really not holding my breath waiting to find out.