Popcorn Perspectives with Danny Minton
Week of February 17, 2025
Captain America: Brave New World
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence, action and some strong language
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 49%
In Theaters
Other than last year’s Deadpool & Wolverine, Marvel has slowed its roll as it has attempted to give us a new meta storyline that would eventually lead to a new Avengers epic. Unfortunately, fans didn’t care much for the whole multi-verse thing (aside from making fun of it in Deadpool), and the new franchises within the franchise didn’t take as well as they had hoped. For this new Captain America movie, you might have some homework that you won’t like, or you can just go in hoping to get the gist. The quick and easy is old Captain is gone and Falcon (Anthony Mackie) now holds the shield. Watching the streaming series Falcon and Winter Soldier will give you enough background there. The painful part is that this really follows up on the heels of The Eternals as the story revolves around the celestial corpse that rose out of the Indian Ocean. America has learned to mine it and holds the first example of adamantium, a substance more powerful than vibranium. The newly-elected president (Harrison Ford) sends the new Cap to fight a few battles, but the real enemy lies within as a somewhat embedded villain (Tim Blake Nelson) discovers a way to turn soldiers against themselves, which causes an international incident, which leads to a hidden issue with the president that makes him angry – and you don’t want to see him when he’s angry. There’s a lot thrown at you here and honestly, there’s too much to catch. The story feels like it is a middle episode of a series, with poor exposition and almost no resolution. Personally, I hate it when Marvel does this. I’d rather have a complete story that can serve as a later puzzle piece, but instead we get here a piece we don’t even know what to do with. I’m sure they hope this will all make sense later, but they’ve been going this direction for a while now. For the last couple of years, we’ve gone from excellent Marvel films to uninteresting and confounding storylines that just don’t fit, and worse, ones we don’t care about. With this new Captain America, if you go for the special effects and the fights, you’ll get a few and you should be happy. The production is good, and the acting is okay given how bad most of the dialog is. But it’s definitely a turn off your brain kind of flick, which will not serve the modern MCU well. C+