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Captain America: Brave New World Movie Review

Captain America: Brave New World is a 2025 superhero film directed by Julius Onah and starring Anthony Mackie and Harrison Ford. It’s a serviceable sequel.

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“Should’ve taken the serum. Bucky’s full of shit“

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Sam Wilson, the new Captain America, finds himself in the middle of an international incident and must discover the motive behind a nefarious global plan. This is the 35^th MCU film and the first to feature the new Cap, who is now played by Anthony Mackie. I haven’t watched his show and I continue to find Marvel’s insistence that we have to watch those television series as well frustrating, but I still managed to mostly follow the plot as it’s quite simple and basic.

I actually liked this flick to a degree and I find its critical reception overly harsh when in reality it’s not better or worse than most of Marvel’s output that they’ve cranked out recently. The best reason to see this movie is for the action, which is surprisingly strong. The fight between the Red Hulk and Cap was quite fun and the aerial dogfight was so well executed and quite thrilling. I also found the VFX better than in some recent MCU flicks, though it still left a lot to be desired when compared to something like ‘Dune’ or even recent television shows.

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Sam Wilson is no Steve Rogers, that goes without saying. He’s bland, boring and forgettable. Anthony Mackie did the best that he could in such a thankless role. I found him to be charismatic here, but the role was underwritten and he felt like an afterthought in his own feature. The villain fared much worse. He was totally disposable and dull.

Other characters are all pretty uninteresting and the movie’s character roster was simply too big to sustain one small film. With that being said, I did appreciate Harrison Ford in this one. Yes, the Trump parallels are not just obnoxious, but truly cringe-worthy how obvious and lazy they are. But the character of President Ross undeniably worked due to an interesting arc that they’ve given him and Ford playing him with a lot of gusto and emotional intensity. Whenever he was on screen, the film came alive, but whenever he wasn’t there, I was bored.

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Aldous Huxley would roll in his grave that they made this slightly plotted blockbuster after his most famous novel. Yes, Brave New World is not brave at all and it’s certainly very cowardly in its failure to properly tackle its political themes. For a film that is so obsessed with political machinations and the world order, it felt way too American-centric and also lacking in sophistication when it comes to depicting these complex issues. Don’t expect Marvel to do strong and sophisticated dialogue, but they shouldn’t even be trying at this point. The movie being a sequel of sorts to ‘The Incredible Hulk’ was also a misstep as nobody really remembers that lackluster flick.