Things go awry when Bradley suddenly tries to assassinate Ross, sending Sam and his sidekick Torres aka the Falcon (Danny Ramirez) on a winding trail that involves a mercenary group called Serpent, led by Giancarlo Esposito’s Sidewinder, Ross’s Black Widow-trained new aide Ruth Bat-Seraph (Shira Haas), and eventually Samuel Sterns (Tim Blake Nelson), back for revenge after the events of The Incredible Hulk (2008).
Is the plot clean? No, not at all. Brave New World has been in production since 2021, and has gone through many permutations, abandoning its ill-advised original title New World Order, removing entire plotlines (including one involving wrestler Seth Rollins), cutting out Bat-Seraph’s background as a mutant Mossad agent, and adding Esposito just a few months ago. Furthermore, Brave New World is filled with references to Marvel’s past, The Incredible Hulk and Captain America: Civil War in particular, and to its future, as the super-metal associated with Wolverine of the X-Men drives the plot.
Rather than belabor its problems, Brave New World blasts right through them with a can-do attitude that can’t help but win viewers over. The fight scenes are genuinely impressive, with Sam’s shield/wing combination leading to fun new variations. The cinematography by Kramer Morgenthau often looks beautiful, making the most of striking locations, including an underground lab and a battleship bridge. An aerial battle that pits Cap and Falcon against a bevy of fighter jets feels new to the MCU, especially because it veers closer to the original Top Gun than Top Gun: Maverick.
That old-school, pre-MCU feel begins with Mackie’s performance as Sam Wilson. Where Mackie brought a laidback, supportive quality to Sam’s previous outings, his stiff take here makes his fight scene one-liners sing. Interactions with Joaquin don’t lighten things up, as Ramirez plays Torres too goofy and laidback, and the two actors never establish a believable rapport. However, whenever Sam’s butting heads with President Ross or staring down Sterns, his furrowed brow and stiff upper lip work in a direct-to-video way.
As much as his press tour playfulness suggested that he might continue his late-career run of surprisingly dialed-in blockbuster performances, Ford never quite clicks into the role of Ross. Much of the blame probably belongs to a script that tries to recover emotional beats from The Incredible Hulk, a bad movie almost 20-years-old in which the late William Hurt portrayed Ross. Ford never finds the right emotional grounding for Ross’s regret. But when he starts getting mad and barking orders, Ford finds that old gruff charm once again.
Instead, Brave New World‘s best performance comes from Lumbly as Isaiah Bradley, the former super soldier we first met in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Lumbly holds together the tragedy of his character, a Black test subject who was rewarded for his successful missions in Korea with a prison sentence from his government. After becoming a brainwashed would-be assassin, Lumbly makes sure we understand that it’s the threat of being jailed again that terrifies him, not that he has failed a country that did nothing for him. Lumbly relates those complex emotions through his incredible face, which Morgenthau uses at every chance. A shot of Bradley in prison uses under lighting to capture every rich line on Lumbley’s expression, indicating sorrow and anger and desperate strength, all at once.
