It’s the hard-knock life for Hulk fans.
Seemingly always the bridesmaid and never the bride, the not-so-jolly green giant has spent decades on the backburner of the cultural zeitgeist. In 2003, just as the initial wave of the comic book movie boom was beginning to crest, on the heels of gigantic successes like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, fellow Marvel stalwart Bruce Banner/The Incredible Hulk got a movie of his own: Ang Lee’s Hulk. The film netted a suitably big opening weekend and then sunk like an absolute stone thanks to negative word of mouth and disparaging reviews.
Then, in 2008, opportunity came knocking once more. The newly created Marvel Studios was going into the film business themselves, with longtime producer Kevin Feige at the helm. To kick off this bold, interconnected cinematic universe, the studio opted for the one-two punch of Jon Favreau’s Iron Man and Louis Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk. Iron Man was a critically acclaimed, massive box office success that would come to define an entire decade of blockbuster movies. Released less than a month later, The Incredible Hulk was decidedly not any of those things. The film was met with mixed reviews and middling box office receipts, resulting in Marvel essentially sweeping the film under the rug as they plowed forward.
The Hulk himself was worked into other ensemble films, albeit with the actor portraying him recast. Gone was Academy Award-nominated Edward Norton, and in his place was Academy Award-nominated Mark Ruffalo for Joss Whedon’s The Avengers in 2012. The character was a scene-stealing smash in that film and led many to wonder if or when another Hulk solo film would happen. But partially due to a host of legal issues with the distributor of Hulk’s previous films (Universal is not exactly keen on playing nice with the House of Mouse when it comes to their estranged parenting of Marvel characters, in movies or at theme parks) and partially due to Marvel’s own fear of publically falling on their faces with yet another failed Hulk movie, this would never come to fruition.
Even in the streaming age, as Marvel migrated a huge swath of its ‘content’ over to Disney+, Hulk fans continued to suffer. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law became a focal point of some faux-culture war bullshit, and Marvel higher-ups have essentially opted to sweep this project under the rug in much the same way. All of this is a shame for a multitude of reasons, but chief among them is that none of these Hulk projects have been bad. I find Ang Lee’s Hulk thoughtful and contemplative, if a bit disjointed. I find Louis Letterier’s The Incredible Hulk to be a primary color-infused rip-roaring good time. I find She-Hulk to be, pretty easily, the best TV show Marvel produced for Disney+ and straight-up wonderful a lot of the time, with Tatiana Maslany delivering a standout lead performance.
Unfortunately, I was just the right (or wrong) age when Hulk came out in 2003 to fall head-over-ass in love with this character. I dragged my parents to the theater to see it multiple times. I played the tie-in video game (which was actually a sequel to the movie and was pretty bad ass) endlessly. My family bought me the DVD boxset of the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno The Incredible Hulk television series, and it essentially played on a loop in our house. I bought any and every Hulk comic book I could physically find(often from disparate runs and eras that made absolutely no sense in isolation, but I did it just the same). I would scrounge the early internet for ripped videos of the ‘90s animated series. I watched all the special features from the 2003 DVD collector’s edition, in which Stan Lee spoke about how he was influenced by Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in creating the Hulk comics, so I went out and rented a DVD of James Whale’s Frankenstein from the library as a young boy, greatly concerning the librarian on duty.
I say all of this to say I am, unfortunately, a dyed-in-the-wool Hulk fan. I inexplicably love this character, his stories, and his gallery of rogues. So when it was announced that Captain America: Brave New World, the Anthony Mackie-starring fourth installment of the series was set to feature Harrison Ford playing General Thunderbolt Ross/Red Hulk, Tim Blake Nelson reprising his role of The Leader from The Incredible Hulk, and Liv Tyler coming back as Betty Ross from that same film? I was… confused. But nonetheless, I couldn’t help but enter the theater optimistic and excited at the prospect of seeing Mackie’s Sam Wilson square off against some of Hulk’s biggest villains.
Regrettably, the film itself is so much worse than I could have ever imagined. Captain America: Brave New World is such a staggering miscalculation, such a perfectly misguided nadir of a film to release at this time and place in culture, speaking both from a political standpoint and from a cinematic standpoint, that it’s kind of amazing to behold.
The marketing for the film has leaned quite heavily into the idea that this film is a ‘political thriller.’ This is not a new trick for Marvel, who keenly realized over a decade ago that diversifying their slate of films via genre-specific marketing tactics helped to differentiate them in the public eye. In 2014, ads for Captain America: The Winter Soldier (an alleged political thriller) and Guardians of the Galaxy (an alleged space opera) were running concurrently. The issue here is that Winter Soldier and Guardians both at least bore the faintest of passing resemblances to their respective genres. Brave New World is a movie without form, and the only genre that it can be said to even remotely fit into is a bloated, mangled superhero movie, plain and simple.
It feels as if Captain America: Brave New World was broken from the outset. From the word go, the genre gimmick of attempting to emulate the political thriller genre and the reality of filling the movie with Hulk-related characters results in something far less than the sum of its parts. This is very much a square-peg, round-hole situation as if in the assembling of the very bones of the film’s structure, the cavalcade of credited and uncredited writers (this thing was very obviously test-screened, reshot, and rewritten to death) opted to use little more than some duct tape and a prayer.
For example, Tim Blake Nelson is in this as The Leader (I would say in name only, but they don’t ever even call him that, so I can’t even say that), and his inclusion is awful. Nelson is a terrific actor and his performance is swinging for something, but it feels so utterly bereft of direction or context, tonally on a completely different level from the entire rest of the film. This results in his inclusion both exponentially worsening the film and stripping the character and performance of anything that could make them unique. The Leader in the comic books is an unabashedly pulpy science-fiction villain who has a big head and is constantly in full-blown maniacal madman mode. But to do the character justice would go against all of the grounded ‘political thriller’ realism they are so clearly striving for. To make matters worse, the character’s visual design is horrendously underwhelming, and he does literally nothing that The Leader is known for in the comics. Instead, he’s just a dude with a funky-looking shower cap on his head, vaguely tinted skin, and a penchant for shooting people with a run-of-the-mill handgun.
The story of the film is absolute nonsense from every perspective and couldn’t feel more as if it was cobbled together on the day in the editing bay. And that editing is atrocious. There is ADR all over this thing in massive chunks, to such an extent that no one at Marvel Studios has any right to ever disparage Sony’s own overuse of ADR in films like Madame Web or Kraven the Hunter ever again because this is just as egregious. The action sequences are robustly lackluster, each one splitting the gamut between either being utterly incomprehensible (the entire setpiece that plays out around the attempted assassination of President Ross is staged and edited so poorly that it is absolutely illegible) or blocked so poorly that it the choreography of the performers feels stilted and lacks any sense of impact (any of the numerous times Sam Wilson fights a host of evil henchmen).
The exception that proves the rule is the final setpiece, which is the much-advertised showdown between Captain America and Ross as Red Hulk. The CG-heavy sequence is perhaps one of the clearest indictments of Marvel’s infamous “don’t worry about the action scenes, we’ll handle that” mentality, as it feels so blatantly divorced from the rest of the film’s visual language. Having said that, there are at least some feeble jolts of joy to be had here, as the Red Hulk himself is easily the most accomplished visual effect in the film, and it’s the only scene in the whole runtime with any sense of escalation. Also, on the most lizard-brained of levels, I did enjoy this sequence for showing me a Hulk doing Hulk stuff, so I guess that was nice.
The thing about a political thriller is that, you know, it has to be political. And if there is anything this film is worse at than staging action, telling a coherent story, or allowing Anthony Mackie’s inherent charm and charisma to actually shine through, it is taking even the most vaguest of political stances. You can practically feel the cold sweat that must have been pouring off of Marvel and Disney executives throughout the real-world Presidential Election process stained into the film itself. Captain America: Brave New World wants to cosplay as a political thriller but wants to say absolutely nothing about politics in the process. Time and again, it breaks the back of its own story so as to deliberately not have to say anything at all. This culminates in an ending that would have felt woefully underbaked and emotionally rushed at any time but rings so ghoulishly hollow in the wake of real-world political turmoil at the moment that it feels outright insulting.
There’s a moment in Captain America: Brave New World that feels like it should be the centerpiece of the film. Sam Wilson goes to visit Isaiah Bradley, the ‘forgotten Captain America’ who was experimented on and unjustly held in prison for decades in between Steve Rogers going into the ice and coming out from it, in prison after Bradley is brainwashed into attempting to assassinate the President. Here, Wilson and Bradley have a tense, emotionally charged exchange that Anthony Mackie and Carl Lumbly, respectively, are more than up to the task of committing to, in theory. But in execution, the scene is a jumbled, muddled mess. Each line they speak to one another feels like a total non-sequitur. There isn’t even the vaguest semblance of an emotional throughline to the conversation. It isn’t a conversation; they’re just each spouting contradictory, nonsensical exposition at one another. It’s a literal encapsulation of the mangled narrative trampling all over the heart and soul of this film, its lead character, and its lead performers.
So now, we find ourselves with a Captain America movie that speed runs its way through wasting some of the Hulk’s most iconic villains without said Hulk ever even having the decency to show up to come face-to-face with these villains onscreen, and fumbles Anthony Mackie’s first cinematic at-bat in the process. It’s a film so blatantly engineered to tie up loose threads within the MCU and wet appetites for what is to come, but it does each of these things so poorly that I can’t imagine anyone will leave this film eager to see more.
RGM GRADE
(D-)
