Mucking with Movies: ‘Captain America: Brave New World’

I went this week to see “Captain America: Brave New World,” the latest step in Marvel’s long and possibly futile march back toward relevancy.

After “Avengers: Endgame,” which I will go to my grave insisting was one of the best movies of 2019 and one of the best of the decade, full-stop, there was nowhere really left for Marvel to go. I would have recommended taking at least two years off from putting movies in theaters, and let us clamor for the return.

How can we miss you if you don’t go away? But alas, money needs to be made, and Disney chose the opposite for its little cash-printing machine. It over-saturated the market with spinoffs and shoehorned television shows onto its streaming service that nobody asked for, leading less to “superhero burnout” and more to just bad storytelling. 

Buckling under its own swollen carcass, every Marvel movie now needs a 10-minute intro to catch up on all the exposition. It eats into the first acts like a parasite, leaving “Captain America: Brave New World” rotten at its core. It is the antithesis of what made the early-era Marvel films so fantastic, that despite the grandiose action, there was deep grounding that made these heroes human.

Marvel built its reputation on empowering young, hot, upcoming directors to use their superheroes as the vessel to tell their stories. Now, the films feel like they are written, directed, and acted by 11th graders. Even pretentious college film students would have at least tried to put fresh creative ideas in there, as trite as they may have been. They’re throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks; casting Harrison Ford as Red Hulk feels like an especially desperate grasp. It’s just so … inconsequential. Ford will never appear in another Marvel movie, and his appearance here is just another ploy in the new tactic of attacking the international markets. 

Never have I seen an American film that is so nakedly made for the international box office. It’s a script without a three-syllable word, and the humor that used to be charming is now cringe-worthy. But I think that’s the point. It’s not supposed to be funny; replacing the quippy one-liners of yesteryear’s “Iron Man” franchise are easily digestible lines designed to fit neatly into subtitles on the bottom of the screen.

About halfway through this two-legged dog of a film, as I tried to figure out how anybody could put their name on something so disgustingly generic, it dawned on me that this couldn’t be some sort of accident. It is meant to be formulaic; it is directed to be as easy to follow as possible. Banal offerings such as these may underwhelm American audiences but rake in massive amounts of money overseas. The Chinese market, in particular, dictates a lot of the decisions American film studios make. Don’t believe me? Calling me conspiratorial or cynical? Go to YouTube’s clip of John Cena apologizing to China in Mandarin for calling Taiwan a country during his “Fast and Furious 9” press tour, and come back to me. Making the script suck is the sacrifice for defeating the language barrier. 

So, back here on our shores, what’s next? Nothing? We are between trends, but the scary part is that the newest trend has not reared its head yet. I’ve long pointed toward horror as a reliable product, both commercially and artistically, but it will always be a compartmentalized genre that some people simply won’t go see.

The mid-budget comedy now has the space to be made now that Marvel isn’t cannibalizing the audience (Make no mistake, every Marvel movie is a comedy at heart), but I don’t see any directors like Adam McKay or performers like Eddie Murphy barreling through that door right now. Even all the reliable young adult IPs, like Harry Potter, which helped carry studios through the 2000s, have all been mined. I think the mining one is an apt metaphor, so let’s continue with it; the future of cinema is the yawning empty pits, formerly filled with precious goods that pervert and pollute the Colorado landscape. Unless there’s a new vein to tap into, everybody invested in this industry is going bankrupt. 

You may have noticed that I didn’t get into the weeds critiquing this movie, and the answer is because I couldn’t. It wasn’t made for me. 

Critic Score: 3 out of 10

Jack Simon is a mogul coach and writer/director who enjoys eating food he can’t afford, traveling to places out of his budget, and creating art about skiing, eating, and traveling while broke. Check out his website jacksimonmakes.com to see his Jack’s Jitney travelogue series. You can email him at jackdocsimon@gmail.com for inquiries of any type.