At the time that I write this review, Captain America: Brave New World is one of the least popular Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films of all time. It has a mediocre Rotten Tomatoes critic score of 53 percent and, at the box office, is underperforming last year's flop from the studio, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Anecdotally—but perhaps more ominously—I've seen all four Captain America movies in theaters, but this is the first one I can recall viewing in a nearly empty auditorium.
Personally, I enjoyed the movie—I rank it as better than the first installment, inferior to the second, and on par with the third—but more importantly, it is fascinatingly relevant. When director Julius Onah and his six cowriters crafted this screenplay, they could not have foreseen that a president from one of America's major parties would drop out of the election in disgrace while the other party's candidate would prevail only to abuse his power in a spectacle of chaos and retribution.
I refer, of course, to former President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, respectively. But first, let's review the actions of President Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross (Harrison Ford), who, despite turning into an angry red monster in the third act, is still a far superior president to either Biden or Trump.
