(courtesy IMP Awards)
Blockbuster movies are supposed to be big, bold and epic.
That’s the whole point of them; to take us into some intensely escapist storytelling that consumes the screen, monopolises all our attention and so subsumes us in a world and a story not our own that we’re barely aware of time passing, the people around us, or, hopefully, that person two rows over (but still annoyingly in our sightline) who keeps checking their phone with near-religious devotion.
Most of them deliver, not always with enough substance to justify any long-term rumination, but they deliver enough spectacular imagery and CGI presence that we can forgive the fact that they linger no more than dandelion puffs whooshing off in the wind.
There are some terrible ones of course that are most definitely sound and fury signifying nothing, but they are almost not as bad as films like Captain America: Brave New World which has the bang and the boom and the action scenes to boot, and also some touching moments that make the heart beat just that little bit faster in empathy, but which ultimately falls flat, leaving not much of a lasting impression.
To be clear, Captain America: Brave New World is not a bad film.
It’s anchored by a fine performance by Anthony Mackie as the newest titular hero, some deftly handled moments of comic repartee with the new Falcon, Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) and Harrison Ford (replacing William Hurt) evincing some raw vulnerability as President Ross and enough forward momentum that you’re not left checking your phone (I still see you person two rows ahead of me) wondering when the hell the thing will end.
The problem is that while all the pieces of a standard Marvel movie are in place, they feel like they’ve been assembled in that pattern because that’s what you do; it’s the studio’s biggest Achilles heel, and it’s this unwillingness to think too much outside the box most of the time that dooms Captain America: Brave New World and leaves it feeling like the whole undertaking has just been phoned in.
We have action set pieces where the good guys – guess who? – duke it out with the bad guys, who are often innocent members of the military and key characters who are mind-controlled by the super-intelligent Big Bad of the piece, Samuels Sterns aka Leader (Tim Blake Nelson) who is on a vengeful campaign against Ross after the newly-installed President went back on a promise to him.
That really is the plot when you boil it down; it’s slight, it’s unsubstantial and it only sustains the movie because of the devotion of Marvel to action scenes that biff, bang, boom, to use old Batman 1960s TV show parlance – yes, yes, I know it’s from a competing superhero studio but never let stand in the way of a creative allusion – and which seem to exist much for much of the story to fill in time.
The thing is that the fight scenes aren’t bad; they possess a certain artistry and balletically aggressive grace that works in the context of the film, lending it a sense of good and evil going at it in a way that satisfies the burning need we all have to make the bad guys pay.
Sure, the good guys may not definitively win but they win enough, or at least don’t die, so they can fight on to make the big, decisive battle an empathetically satisfying thing.
But they also feel like fillers, placeholders in a film that, without them, would come perilously close to not feeling like much of anything and certainly not the brash, Hulk-like blockbuster we’ve gone to see.
On that note, much of the narrative impact of Captain America: Brave New World is lost by the trailer which shows us Red Hulk, and while it’s not explicitly linked, you would have be unobservant in the extreme not to notice that Ross and Hulk seem to more than a little close to each other when the big moment of transformation arrives.
So, not a spoiler because the trailer has already been there and well and truly done that, and honestly, while it’s meant to be a BIG MOMENT, what follows feels like padding to the get to the end of the movie.
Yes, a towering bright red muscular figure who pounds around Washington D.C., destroying the White House, the Washington Monument and all those lovely blossoming cherry trees that sit along the curving watery beauty of the Tidal Basin, and it really doesn’t amount to much at all.
In fact, the resolution of the scene, which won’t be revealed here, while emotional, is not exactly the stuff of which blockbuster final acts are made, and while it deliver a slight moment of emotionality, Captain America: Brave New World largely just trails off into the distance instead of ending with any sort of emphatic bang.
There are lots of narrative bits and bobs flying around, including a stoush between the U.S. and Japan over the adamantium that’s in Celestial Island – a relic of the impressively big and bold and criminally under-regarded Marvel film, Eternals (which was way better than many people give it credit for) – and some big friendship and relationship moments that are carried largely by Mackie’s superlative performance working with sub-par material, but by and large, Captain America: Brave New World is the kind of lower tier Marvel effort that could wait for the smaller streaming screens of home.
It is, once again, not a bad film, and you don’t feel like you’ve thrown away just under two hours of your life, but there’s no rush of blockbuster satisfaction, no sense of a massive narrative-peaking adrenaline rush and no lingering sense that here is something profoundly good and wonderful.
Sure, you don’t have to have that when you leave a film, and many of the indie and arthouse films get by just fine with a quiet emotional impact that affects you without shouting its effects from the rooftop, but when you go to see a film like Captain America: Brave New World, you expect some shock and awe, and at least for a little while, some sense that you have seen some special and worth your time and alas this film does not do that, at least not enough to make it worth your cinema while.
And yes, there is a post-credits scene …