Captain America: Brave New World Review — A Conspiracy Thriller With No Conspiracy

Captain America: Brave New World took $413.6 million worldwide on a $180 million budget and scored 47% with critics — the lowest of Marvel's 2025 slate and one of the weakest of the franchise. It is not a disaster in the way certain other recent Marvel films have been disasters. It is something more dispiriting: an entirely competent film with nothing whatsoever on its mind, assembled from parts that no longer fit together. Here is what went wrong, specifically.

The Verdict

The Central Problem: Sam Has No Story

Sam Wilson taking the shield is the most interesting premise Marvel has had in years. He has no super-soldier serum. He is a Black man carrying an American symbol in a country that experimented on Isaiah Bradley and imprisoned him for thirty years. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier built all of that carefully and ended with Sam accepting the burden.

Brave New World does almost nothing with it. The lack of a serum is mentioned twice and never once creates a problem the wings do not solve. Isaiah Bradley is present, and Carl Lumbly is as good as ever, but he functions as a plot device — imprisoned to generate act-two urgency and released when the plot needs him gone. The film raises the theme, acknowledges it is important, and moves to the next set piece. That is the whole movie in miniature.

A film about a man without powers holding a symbol should be about what the symbol costs. This one is about a helicarrier.

Four Specific Failures

1. The thriller has no conspiracy. The genre demands that the audience assemble the picture slightly ahead of or behind the protagonist. Here the antagonist's plan is explained in dialogue at the midpoint and executed exactly as described. There is nothing to solve and therefore nothing to fear.
2. Samuel Sterns is wasted. Tim Blake Nelson returning as the Leader, seventeen years after The Incredible Hulk, should have been a genuine coup. Instead he is a mind-control plot generator, given a grievance that is entirely reasonable — he was imprisoned without trial for over a decade — which the film raises and then declines to engage with. It is the Killmonger template attempted and abandoned, and we cover why that template is so hard to execute in our analysis.
3. The editing is visibly reconstructed. The film underwent extensive reshoots, and it shows in the seams: characters appear in scenes they have no reason to be in, a subplot involving a returning Ross-adjacent figure evaporates, and the runtime sits at 118 minutes with the pacing of something that used to be considerably longer and about something else.
4. The Red Hulk finale is unearned spectacle. Harrison Ford is committed and the transformation is well realised, but the film has not built a single thematic reason for it. Ross becoming a monster should be the culmination of a character arc about a man who has spent five films trying to control power. Instead it is the action beat the third act required.

What Actually Works

• Anthony Mackie. He is warm, physically credible, and finds real weariness in a role the script keeps at surface level. He deserves a better film and will probably get one.
• Danny Ramirez's Joaquin Torres has genuine chemistry with Mackie and provides the only relationship in the film with any texture.
• The wing-based action is well staged. The opening sequence is the most legible action Marvel has shot in years.
• Harrison Ford is not phoning it in, which he could easily have done. The performance is better than the material supporting it.
• Shira Haas and Giancarlo Esposito are both good in roles that amount to about eleven minutes between them.

The Reshoot Problem, Fairly Stated

Marvel has not published a shot-by-shot account of what changed, and we are not going to present reporting on the reshoot process as confirmed fact. What is observable on screen is a film with two tonal registers that do not blend, subplots that begin and stop, and a villain structure where one antagonist appears to have been substantially reduced. Whatever the process was, the result is a movie that plays like an assembly rather than a film.

Where It Sits

Brave New World is not the worst Marvel film. It is the emptiest. Quantumania is worse but at least fails while attempting something. This fails at the level of intention — it does not appear to want anything, which is a strange quality in a Captain America picture, historically the most thematically serious line in the franchise.

The consolation is that Marvel's next two 2025 releases were considerably better. Thunderbolts* landed at 88% and lost money anyway, covered in our review, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps hit 87% and became the year's biggest Marvel film — see our verdict. Mackie is confirmed in the ensemble for Avengers: Doomsday on 18 December 2026, and there is every reason to think a better ensemble film will serve him better than this one did.

The Bottom Line

Watch it if you are completist, skip it if you are not, and do not let it be the film that decides your opinion of Sam Wilson as Captain America. The character is stronger than this movie. So is the actor playing him.