Captain America: Brave New World Was Aggressively Mid (Spoiler-Free Review)

Jesse Grant. Getty Images.

First of all, shout out to whoever came up with the "aggressively mid" tagline for this movie because it fit like a goddamn glove. Captain America: Brave New World didn't suck (trust me, we've seen some recent MCU projects that did suck). But it wasn't great either. It wasn't even good. It was just…mid. 

Without getting into spoilers, there was definitely some stuff that worked and some stuff that completely flopped. The chemistry between Cap 2.0 and Falcon 2.0 was entertaining like characters from Ant-Man chopping it up. Anthony Mackie makes you believe that Sam Wilson is a human worthy of holding the shield Steve Rogers made famous. Red Hulk reminded me of why I loved Ragnarok since a Hulk fucking shit up on the big screen is undeniably awesome.

However there was too much average or bad in the movie for it to be worthy of even a good review. The beginning felt like a bonus episode of the show, which is not a good thing. A lot of the conflicts were lame that were wrapped up with even lamer resolutions before they shuffled us to the next part of the movie. Giancarlo Esposito's character felt like nothing more than a way to get people excited because the guy who played Gus Fring is in the movie. And you won't believe this, but a Marvel movie had an underwhelming main villain who could've been so much better!

Add it all up and you get an extremely meh movie, which admittedly is an upgrade over some of the projects Marvel has slopped into our eyeballs since Endgame. But it still falls short of the Cap movies of the past and does nothing to advance the Cap character for the future or the Avengers before their two upcoming movies. Even the post credits scene fell flat, which used to be the one thing that MCU movie viewers could use a brain mint to convince themselves a movie was better than it was thanks to it building something in the future.

I think/hope we will get a better movie in Thunderbolts and flat out expect Fantastic Four to run laps around Brave New World like Steve did to Sam once upon a time. If both of those don't happen, it may be time for a cuncel. Hopefully it doesn't reach that point.

For a full spoilerific review of the movie and where the MCU goes from here, check out today's My Mom's Basement.