'Captain America 4' Review: Maybe This is Just What Marvel Studios Is Now?

'Brave New World' is a lazily-retrofitted and dumbed-down hybrid of 'Winter Soldier' and 'Civil War' that trades present-tense topicality for 'Incredible Hulk' nostalgia.

Captain America: Brave New World
2025/118 minutes/PG-13

We can only speculate about what happened behind the scenes of Captain America: Brave New World. Yet the final product feels like a rushed, superficial combination of The Winter Soldier and Civil War, lacking those films’ confidence, enthusiasm, or any genuine engagement (even theoretically) with the issues it claims to address. It is a cowardly, half-assed conspiracy-focused actioner that is less focused on establishing a solid foundation for Anthony Mackie as the “new” Captain America than it is on A) once again attempting to retroactively reintegrate less successful MCU movies (I’m sure folks flocking to a Sam Wilson Captain America movie care most about whether Liv Tyler’s Betty Ross will make a cameo) and B) steering clear of anything that might provoke the YouTube Troll brigade. Not since Tim Story’s 2019 Shaft movie have I seen a major film supposedly centered on Black protagonists striving so hard to seem unthreatening to white audiences. 

We know we are in deep shit almost from the get-go. Following a brief and moody prologue featuring newly-elected president Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (reintroduced with Harrison Ford taking over for the late William Hurt), we get frantic past-tense newscast exposition reminding audiences of The Incredible Hulk. Throughout the 110 minutes (plus credits), storytelling and plotting are unspooled via news anchors and exposition delivered by characters wearing masks or not quite onscreen. It’s a “political thriller” dumbed down to a Golden Books adaptation, with generic platitudes and buzzwords instead of specificity and nuance. Pro tip - Do *not* take a drink whenever any character says “treaty” or “the buyer” or you will die. That the broad strokes play out like a loose combo of the last two Captain America movies only serves to remind us how badly Mackie is getting screwed. Imagine if Roger Moore’s first 007 movie was A View to a Kill…

While delays and reshoots are not automatically a sign of doom and gloom, it is painfully noticeable when a slumming Giancarlo Esposito appears in scenes that feature him and almost no one else on set. His two significant scenes serve as pale imitations of similar action set pieces from The Winter Soldier. Meanwhile, the core plot (Sam and his young would-be protege go quasi-rogue after his axe-to-grind friend gets framed for political violence that may stem from mind control) is essentially a lower-budget, smaller-scale rehash of Civil War without that film’s tentpole-sized scale or moral dilemmas. Aside from one clever second-act aerial battle that focuses on preventing a classically 007-ish "tit for tat” military escalation, the film feels so small and contained that I’m half-inclined to believe that it “only” cost $180 million even after the revisions. Yes, this feels smaller in scope than Disney+’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

It’s far less thoughtful and relevant than even that flawed yet ambitious in-between chapter. The show absolutely dropped the ball in the last episode, reforming its “white killer cop” character for the upcoming Thunderbolts movie. Nonetheless, most of the six-episode series at least engaged with and confronted its timely drama, addressing the sort of social hot-button issues that this film either chose to ignore or retroactively erased. Carl Lumbly reprises as the tragic Isiah Bradley, yet his dialogue (along with that of those around him) isn’t nearly as confrontational as what we got on streaming. Sure, the longtime geek-friendly actor — I’m so old I watched the TV movie pilot of Fox’s Mantis when it first aired — again over-delivers. Yet there’s certainly no dialogue as compelling as Sam Jackson’s “my father liked people” speech in The Winter Soldier or visuals as jolting as the blood-stained shield that concluded, “The Whole World Is Watching.” 

It doesn’t help that Harrison Ford is not remotely on his A-game. The fact that Ford received “pre-title billing in the trailers” alongside Mackie (I think that’s a first for an MCU movie…?) makes sense since this is as much Last Temptation of Ross as it is “Sam Wilson’s first Captain America Adventure.” There’s little commentary on how a guy who caused a mass-casualty monster attack can gradually rise to the presidency, but his ability to politically survive such circumstances (along with whatever blowback transpired as a result of Civil War) is mere trivia compared to the expectation that we care whether Ross has changed his moral stripes and fulfilled his promises to be a better person. The (comparative) narrative and thematic courage of an MCU that previously would have allowed a Nazi-infiltrated SHIELD to burn to the ground or allow the founded-in-genocide Asgard to be destroyed is nowhere to be found.

It’s not automatically a criticism to argue that the new Captain America movie is pitched at a younger level — there are just a few disconnected moments of gun violence that seem either added or not removed to ensure a PG-13 — than prior installments. However, there is a big difference between tentpoles aimed at smart kids versus… less smart kids or (speculation alert) folks of all ages who might be watching while scrolling on their phone. This is a simplistic, one-the-nose, stripped-to-the-bone actioner, the kind of barren and sloppy thriller where the President has no advisors, no Vice President and seemingly no standard executive branch employees. While written and structured like a stereotypical Saturday morning cartoon, it self-defeatingly bases much of its emotional impact on audiences caring about tie-ins to one poorly-reviewed MCU movie that tanked 18 years ago and another poorly-received, more adult-skewing offering that tanked just over three years ago.

It’s easy to assume that Disney perhaps intended to let Malcolm Spellman and friends make a Mackie-starring and Julius Onah-directed Brave New World that played in the same political sandbox as The Falcon and the Winter Soldier before capitulating to their apparent post-Lightyear mode of anticipatory obedience. The finished product implies as much, including a final scene that feels written and staged as if from a more resonant screenplay. Beyond the extent to which the fourth Captain America is neither brave nor new, it’s a reminder that the MCU became the all-encompassing tentpole champion at least partially because they were better, more nuts-and-bolts competent and more resonant than the 2010s likes of Battleship, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, King Arthur and Men in Black: International. Movies like this are the inverse, where a Marvel movie is less than while relying on the fanbase to accept mediocrity due to brand loyalty and “Infinity Saga”-era goodwill.

More than a decade after Guardians of the Galaxy, the MCU is no longer the only game in town. Being a Marvel (or DC) superhero has lost its status as the ultimate aspirational milestone, even for actors who look more like Danny Ramirez than Wyatt Russell. For an excellent Anthony Mackie star turn, there’s Apple’s The Banker. For Mackie as a superhero running and running amid a politically complicated warzone, there’s Netflix’s decent Outside the Wire. Besides Destin Daniel Cretton’s terrific Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, their 2020s output has mostly coasted on past-tense glories, even, like Spider-Man: No Way Home and Deadpool & Wolverine from non-MCU franchises. Perhaps that’s what Marvel Studios is now. It once ruled because it made films like Iron Man 3, Thor: Ragnorak and Black Panther. Now, it’s just become the studio that once made films like Iron Man 3, Thor: Ragnorak and Black Panther.