After essentially taking 2024 off for Deadpool & Wolverine, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is back this year with three new superhero franchise pictures. Captain America: Brave New World is the first off the rank, and marks the fourth Captain America – and the first with Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson assuming the persona. If it feels as if the main MCU never went away, it is because this new films continues to adopt the slowing momentum and general lack of necessity that has dogged this extended universe since Avengers: Endgame back in 2019. Basically, Brave New World is a movie with some action scenes, some intrigue, and some humorous bits. If you are permanently glued to everything Marvel Studios makes, it is an enjoyable two hours of entertainment – but that, honestly, is about it. I’ve enjoyed director Julius Onah’s work in the past, notably his underrated The Cloverfield Paradox (2018), but I am unsure he was up to the task here. Everything feels a little bit too much like a well-funded streaming drama.

Brave New World picks up shortly after the election of general-turned-politician Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross (Harrison Ford) as President of the United States. Desperate to lock in a new international treaty over the mysterious Celestial Island (see The Eternals), he leans heavily on new Captain America Sam Wilson (Mackie) for support. When an assassination attempt threatens the treaty, Sam begins to track a conspiracy that leads to an act of revenge years in the making.

Anthony Mackie does an excellent job of headlining the film. This is no small feat given the difficult script assigned to him. On the one hand it feels functional and over-familiar, like a weak re-tread of early Captain America film The Winter Soldier with generic action. On the other it succumbs to Marvel’s increasingly common sense of inside baseball. To fully comprehend the events and characters here, one needs to have seen multiple feature films and streaming series going back all the way to 2008. It feels wildly out of synch, and to be honestly slightly disorienting, as if rather than abandon an underwhelming storyline its writers – five of them are credited – kept working and reworking until they had something releasable. Of course ‘releasable’ is a long, worrisome distance from ‘good’.

Harrison Ford provides his usual wry charm, but it is odd to see him effectively conclude a years-long story arc for the character – who until his death was played by William Hurt. On the one hand you could commend Marvel for hiring such a legendary performer to wrap up that storyline, but on the other it isn’t really clear that the storyline actually needed this conclusion. There is a fan-pleasing climax that would have been quite a surprise, had it not featured prominently in almost all of the film’s marketing.

There is a post-credit scene, as always. Marvel enthusiasts probably want to know that. It is absolutely not worth the six-minute wait through the end credits though; better to get a head-start to the car park.