Captain America: Brave New World, a sympathetic action parenthesis (critic)

Not very strong narrative, the new film Captain America makes the essentials with beautiful Fight scenes. That’s already it.

“Together”. This is the first word that appears on the screen, before seeing Harrison Ford appear. It is he, the new president of the USA in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and he will give his first speech. An appeal to union in a divided country, okay, but which remains a country, a nation, America, and “America Has Spoken”, as Ford … sorry, Thaddeus Ross. It would obviously be very tempting to make a bunch of parallels between Brave New World And the context present, but it would also be a little too much ask the film … which remains a film of the Marvel Cinematic Universe of the 20s, so a little at the end of the race, a little stretched, a little soft, not enough for Whether it is a conscious reflection of US political life of the last months.

We are still talking about a film where the USA, under the aegis of the new President Ross, a former stubborn soldier and obsessed with hunting for Hulk (at least since the film of Ang Lee in 2003!) And superheroes in all Like, try to negotiate a multilateral agreement to share the riches that lie in the titanic corpse of the celestial defeated by the Eternal (cf. the eponymous film of 2021) and frozen since in the Indian Ocean. At the same time, Captain America is investigating around an attempted murder of the new president with the help of a few NPCs crossed during the series Falcon and the winter soldier…

Brave New World: “Empathy is Captain America’s super-power”

So, bad news: if you’ve almost let go of most of the MCU since, let’s say, the pandemic, you risk missing things. Even if the film makes laudable efforts to explain and/or contain them as much as possible, in order to accomplish its main mission, namely to deliver an action thriller with government superheroes fought much more earth battles than to batify in the cosmos.

The film thus contains three major action scenes, the assault of a Mexican monastery, a dogfight above the Indian ocean, and a mano mano between the course and the red hulk (no spoiler: c ‘ is on the poster of the film, anyway) which are well screwed visually and far from the visual debacles of the last Marvel (remember The nightmare Thor: Love and Thunder ?). Between these three scenes, we investigate, we confuse and plot, and the observation is less brilliant, both narratively and visually. For example, the motivation of the supermechant that pulls the strings behind all this bazaar is as cheap as its makeup (there, for once, we are going to spoil anything), a film of a film ultimately defeated by its more television than cinematographic DNA.

Still, we are satisfied with certain things: Anthony Mackie is a nice hero, with his gay-friendly cool side, well-supported by Danny Ramirez (already appeared in Falcon and the winter soldier) and especially Shira Haas (revelation series Unorthodox), amazing in black government black widow as three apples and capable of restoring a naked marine squad.

The other attraction of the film is obviously Harrison Ford, even if he rebuilds his number of the series Shrinkingwhere he plays a grumpy Californian veteran shrink like Jaja and desperately trying to connect with his daughter -like Thaddeus Ross in the film that interests us, hold. Like what, the context of Brave New World Not just about a certain Trump. In any case, the “political” speech (note the quotes) of the film consists above all in exalting the union, making Captain America a unusual and inspiring hero, and these are things that are banal enough to be valid anyway Where, anytime in the great American heroic imagination.

Exactly, Brave New World would have done better to develop the character of Isaiah Bradley (played by the brilliant Carl Lumbly), Captain America Noir of the 1950s, hero of the Korean War unjustly imprisoned for thirty years by the government. As the film is released in the middle of February and it is the “Black History Month” in the USA, it could have been a narrative arc much more interesting than these stories of being cosmic failed and gamma rays, but hey, what do you want -YOU, Marvel has spoken.

Captain America: Brave New Worldfrom Julius Onah, with Anthony Mackie, Harrison Ford, Danny Ramirez … released on February 12.