Hogan Reviews

Catching up with the MCU now, with a film I’d been putting off for a while just because I hadn’t heard it was terrible or great, just lots of middling reviews. “Brave New World” had lots of rewrites and re-shoots and by the end of the film it was obvious that it was a bit of a jumbled mess, and hey guess what? Decidedly average, as “promised”. Oh well, at least it tied up a few loose ends in the MCU canon, that’s something, right?

The film kicks off with Thaddeus Ross (now played by Harrison Ford) getting elected as President despite plenty of reporting about how much of an unstable knob he was (that’s not realistic etc, etc) and then we see Captain America (Anthony Mackie) and the new Falcon in Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) break up a weapons deal led by the mercenary group known as Serpent (no “Society” tagline here, or goofy costumes, sadly though understandably…) which is led by Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito playing a villainous group leader with the exact same look at he always has… don’t get me wrong, he plays the role great as always but it’s getting a little silly now…) and although Sidewinder gets away and the buyer isn’t revealed they recapture what was apparently stolen, which is explain in a bit. Before that we see Cap and Falcon meet up with Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly) the second Super Soldier who was imprisoned for 30 years, as seen in “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” a while back. The three of them head to the White House where Ross tries to convince Sam Wilson/Cap to restart the Avengers before giving a speech revealing that the Celestial that had partially popped up out of the Earth in The Eternals film was now contested land and that a peace treaty needed to be made to share the brand new material that the Celestial is made out of: Adamantium! Hooray, they said the thing at last…

Cap arrives on the scene. Don’t worry, this is an MCU film, the mask vanishes almost immediately so the actor can show his face for the duration of the runtime. Just in case we forget what Anthony Mackie looks like!

The object Cap and Falcon retrieved was Japan’s chunk of Adamantium, so they really saved the day… until a bunch of guests at the party suddenly start shooting around the President, including Bradley. While they’re all stopped, thanks in part to the Israeli former Black Widow Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas) who works closely with the President (an Israeli working closely with the President everyone was shocked to see elected due to his shady past?! Etc etc…) Cap and Falcon soon track down the source of what turned these normal people into killers to an off-the-record facility where they discover Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson, returning to the role from 2008’s Hulk movie… man, nearly 20 years?!) who all this time had been locked away by Thaddeus Ross in order to help him with his gamma radiated brain. So the character in the comics, called “The Leader”, can hypnotise people, so while he’s using flashing phone screens and he’s never referred to as the Leader he’s more comic accurate than you’d think, apart from not having a colossal head anyway… Sterns escapes the facility and Ross loses face with the Japanese government thanks to the villain leaking documents to the country that claims the US stole the Japanese Adamantium in the first place.

Sterns, looking more like Frankenstein’s Monster than The Leader, though a forehead the size of a bookshelf would probably remove any tension from his scenes, to be fair…

Cap, Falcon and Ruth, who is now on their side, head to where Sidewinder is being kept (Falcon had captured him earlier, forgot to say about that…) and get the hint about Sterns plans so head to “Celestial Island” to help clear his name but instead two pilots are hypnotised and start attacking Japanese warships, leading to Cap and Falcon to… start taking on the Japanese ships to stop them from attacking, and THEN try to safely take out the US planes actually attacking people, during which Falcon is critically injured, and Ross is taunted over the radio by Sterns, and nearly transforms… … Into the Red Hulk, because it’s all over the trailers, posters, physical release covers, Disney Plus thumbnails and more, so no point in hiding it, even if the scene in question doesn’t happen until the “spoiler” section down below…

So it was nice to see some threads tied up, especially the tease of the Leader way back in 2008, but the film feels very much like a series of action sequences written and filmed at different points just stitched together with just enough linking plot for it to make at least a little bit of sense. Just. Given everything that happened behind the scenes it’s obvious why the film feels like that, but that doesn’t excuse it I’m afraid. The acting was good on the whole at least!

Overall Thoughts:

See? I told you: There’s Anthony Mackie!

“Captain America: Brave New World” is ironically the furthest thing from brave or new as it wheels out familiar MCU tropes that barely pin all the separate action set pieces together, and then delivers a flat and somewhat confusing finale to boot. Oh well, the acting was good and some of the flashy sequences were fun to sit back and watch, but I don’t think I’ll be in a hurry to pop this back on again, especially based off how strong the previous three Cap movies are…

Sam Wilson watches as the new Falcon has surgery and begins to doubt whether he should be Cap and why he was given the shield by Steve Rogers in the first place (you know, the whole plot of “Falcon and the Winder Soldier”) and is convinced to suit back up by a visiting Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) (so even more like the mini-series!) Sam then finds out that Ross has been taking pills given to him by Sterns because he was dying and its only these pills that were keeping him alive, and that he’d promised to release Stern once he became President but pulled back on the deal when he became afraid he’d stop giving him the said pills. What he didn’t know is that the pills were full of gamma radiation. His original plan having been foiled but with a new one on the way Sterns… turns himself in, for some reason and goes back to prison. Huh… okay. As he does this Ross loses control at a press conference and turns into the Red Hulk, smashing up the White House and going on a rampage until Cap arrives.

The Red Hulk appears… and with no original Hulk in sight, anywhere in the movie. Oh well… better than nothing I guess!

The two fight for a bit until Captain America manages to clam Ross down enough that he de-Hulks and that’s that! It wasn’t much of a final fight, honestly, and I was even more confused why Sterns turned himself in because ruining Ross’s career and reputation was his plan and he achieved it with this final rampage, and it was all because Ross didn’t release him from prison when he promised, so why did he go back to prison himself willingly?! Ah whatever. Isaih Bradley is released from prison, Falcon/Torres wakes up and will recover and Ross is put in the Raft prison but at least finally sees his daughter Betty again (Liv Tyler), I guess nearly killing a load of people in a gamma fuelled super rampage made her finally see her father in a positive light…? Oh and we get a post credits tease where Sterns in prison says that using his deductive skills he knows Cap isn’t ready for when “they” arrive from other worlds. A simple but still fun tease.