Dylan Masvidal | Staff Writer
Complacency is the death of creativity.
Like it or not, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or MCU, has become the poster child for this notion, coasting off the success and built-up goodwill from a saga that ended more than five years ago.
Now, all that’s left of the franchise is a directionless new strategy with a success rate on par with Lebron James knowing the lyrics to a Pop Smoke song.
Excuse my overbearing pessimism and sass; I’m typically not one to lose hope so quickly.
“Captain America: Brave New World” is, unfortunately, yet another nail in the coffin of my love for these films that’s a couple more hammer swings away from being sealed shut.
There’s no sugarcoating this one: It’s a waste of talent and time.
A fate one could predict from before the Marvel Studios logo pops up on screen, as “Captain America: Brave New World” was plagued with many a reshoot after early test screenings came back not so peachy.
The whole production just reeked of disaster from the jump with the constant retooling of character involvement and action scenes.
This results in a jumbled, cookie-cutter mess of a comic book espionage thriller that wants to be taken super seriously but needs five writers to create the most unnatural-sounding dialogue imaginable.
The hamster wheel in my brain almost spontaneously combusted when it saw five writers credited for this movie.
Have we learned nothing from the failures of the Michael Bay “Transformers: The Last Knight” school of writing?
Clunky exchanges between Sam Wilson and just about every other character, from his unfunny sidekick Joaquin Torres to the paint-chip-eating evil mastermind Samuel Sterns, do nothing to establish real relationship dynamics or unravel the “mystery” in an engaging fashion.
It’s all transitional, a cornucopia of exposition dumping and callbacks to past Marvel movies and Disney+ series’ nobody watched to remind the audience of the world this is taking place in instead of showing them.
And I get it; the MCU hasn’t been a paradigm of exceptional writing lately.
Marvel’s comic book blockbuster style relied on memorable performances in spite of poor penmanship.
Where there’s no direction, however, there’s no sense of urgency.
The very talented Anthony Mackie, who has a deep reverence for the character of Captain America, couldn’t bother switching off autopilot mode during the film, and I don’t blame him either.
Even the legendary Harrison Ford as Thunderbolt Ross can’t stray away from being a lifeless corpse until his pre-Red Hulk transformation growls become a bit of unintentional comedy.
The only performer displaying an inkling of passion throughout the movie is Carl Lumbly as Isaiah Bradley, but he gets a sliver of screen time after the first act.
One of the few likable qualities of “Captain America: Brave New World” is its occasionally cool fight choreography since the cinematography is certainly not worth mentioning, with gross backlighting and an even worse green screen to boot.
While most of the hand-to-hand combat consists of the same recycled batch of kicks, Captain America using his shield in any manner is always a treat.
I also found two instances of a wrestling move being used — a gut-wrench powerbomb through a wooden chair and a shotgun dropkick into a car windshield — quite exhilarating.
The film must have noticed the smile on my face and had to quickly get rid of it, ending with what can only be perceived as the most baffling post-credits scene Marvel has ever cooked up.
Forget waving the white flag; this is self-sabotage.
Again, don’t mistake my doom and gloom for an admission of defeat.
I want to hop back on the MCU bandwagon and be excited about a future Captain America project.
But Kevin Feige is making it a near-impossible task to do so.
Looking past their attempt at a “Suicide Squad” knockoff in May, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” better knock it out of the park and into a new stratosphere, because this method of settling for mediocrity and hoping to get away with it just isn’t cutting it anymore.
No matter how often you think you’ve fooled me, it’s still shame on you.
3/10.
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