The product of three different release dates, five screenwriters and six months of reshoots – plus a mid-production title change – Captain America: Brave New World clobbers into cinemas bearing the dents and scrapes you’d expect. This is the 35th film in a Marvel saga that’s lost its way in recent years. Will there be a creative turnaround anytime soon? It’s not likely, based on the material here. Brave New World is stuffed with callbacks to movies everyone seemed to agree were misfires upon release – among them Chloe Zhao’s dismal 2021 space oddity Eternals and the Edward Norton-starring The Incredible Hulk from 2008. It leaves the film not so much a reshuffling of the deck as a journey to nowhere, like switching rooms on the Titanic.
Our hero is Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, who assumed the Captain America mantle after Chris Evans turned in his shield in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame. Invited to the White House by President Thaddeus Ross (a blandly stern Harrison Ford), he’s embroiled in a conspiracy when Ross is nearly assassinated during a speech. Wilson eventually realises – though long after it becomes patently obvious where all of this is headed – that someone is using mind control to disrupt Ross’s plans to share between nations an alien metal alloy that’s just been discovered in the Indian Ocean.
