Sam Wilson is back.

Today’s review is for Captain America: Brave New World, the penultimate movie in Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and a movie I have looked forward to with the same kind of enthusiasm that I reserve for my oil change. Nah that’s kinda mean. I looked at it with the same enthusiasm as the next time I slam the door knob on my ass. A little fear, but some hope.

You know what? Phase 5 hasn’t been that bad all things considered. Ant-Man aside, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was a fantastic movie that gave me a severe case of the feels. Past Connor gave The Marvels a B+ and I do fondly remember that movie, especially the singing planet. Kamala is adorable. Deadpool & Wolverine was just the kind of fan service people have been waiting for. Secret Invasion was crap but Loki and What If season 2 were good. I didn’t watch Echo, and Agatha and Spider-Man were good.

So Captain America was probably always going to be something of a disappointment. Brave New World begs the big question of what are we even doing here? And the answer is to set things up for future Marvel movies of course. Now that Hulk has been relegated to an annoying dweeb, we need a new Hulk. A red Hulk if you will. One of the problems of the MCU being as long as it is is that you eventually tend to rehash plot beats while forcing the cast to not remember the last movie. Brave New World repeats a lot of beats from Winter Soldier, only they make everyone dumber.

How long ago was Winter Soldier in this world that everyone just forgot about the whole brainwashing idea? They reintroduce brainwashing in this via phone light pulses and at first nobody at the White House believes it’s being used to hypnotize sleeper agents. How? They’ve known about it at least since Bucky in Winter Soldier and given the numerous government programs all around the world that work on brainwashing sleeper soldiers the whole world should pretty much know about it by now.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Brave New World was directed by Julius Onah who you may remember from The Cloverfield Paradox. It sees the return of Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, aka Captain America as the MCU progresses into the next phase of bringing in the X-Men. So naturally the Celestial from Eternals is being examined for its natural resources and contains what else but adamantium. The new Falcon is Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez) who is the amateur superhero of the series.

And because the movie needs to integrate things we have Shira Haas as Ruth Bat-Seraph, who was an ex Black Widow. Carl Lumbly is back as Isaiah Bradley, although I had no clue who he was because I never finished Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Giancarlo Esposito plays Sidewinder because he is a fantastic actor and I love seeing him in everything. Tim Blake Nelson plays Samuel Sterns, the bad guy. And Harrison Ford plays President Ross, who turns into Red Hulk in the last 30 minutes because we need that moment of the film and we need to remind the audience that there is a Hulk for future fights.

Brave New World is not a bad movie, but it’s not a particularly good movie. It feels like a rehash of Winter Soldier that also tries to orbit around political topics without getting into any of them. I did really enjoy the performances of Mackie and Ford. It’s nowhere near as bad as Quantumania, but out of the rest of the Phase 5 movies I would place it near the bottom. The visuals in the White House scene and the final 30 minutes were pretty bad.

But I have no problem with Mackie being the new Captain America, I’m sure he can make it work. The costumes progressively look worse in each movie as they stray away from having real costumes and go to entirely CG suits. It’s disappointing, and makes DC’s pajama costumes look much better by comparison.

Rating: C+