Divalicious Review! Marvel’s Captain America: Brave New World Has Clipped Wings
By Caroline Cao | February 13, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture
Movie Diva Caroline Cao shares her thoughts on the MCU’s latest offering.
The thing with Marvel is that so much feels mandated. There’s a superhero quip and banter that might be funny. It still feels by committee. Captain America: Brave New World—directed by Julius Onah of Luce—elicits decent beats of a mystery political thriller but feels like it’s waiting to unleash itself as a comic movie.
Following The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), the saga between Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky, Brave New World follows Sam’s dilemma over whether he wants to collaborate with the newly elected President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford). The movie culminates in the story’s moral at the end, where Sam reaffirms that he sees the good in everyone. But it’s platitudes that simplify the film’s politics. And his self-doubts and arcs aren’t given breathing room.
It’s a shame to bland up Mackie in his starring role, especially after he had a bit to work with in Falcon and the Winter Soldier. In this movie, Sam only gets to have a real charge motive through his relationship with his elder, the long-suffering super soldier Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly with senior bravado), who gets entrenched in a nasty situation.
There’s fun comic camp to be found in the emotional stakes waiting to burst out of President Ross. From a political angle, trying to humanize President Ross in an “I’m trying to change” sense is simplistic, though Harrison credibly juggles his noble desires, personal struggles and repressed might. Giancarlo Esposito is also eating up his role as a mercenary.
But the heart of this film is the cauliflowered Tim Blake Nelson as the mutated brainy Sam Sterns, with a vendetta against the president. He threads the needle in delightful villain camp and menace, and he embraces a colorful cartoonishness that the film would have benefited more from.
This is a fast-paced romp with plenty of surprises and easter eggs. And there’s a blast of a third-act fight with blazing imagery. But I feel this MCU chapter needed a bit more flight to really get off the ground.
Photo credit: Disney
