There’s something so bloody-minded about this workmanlike Marvel entry, you can only applaud it. Rather than bowing to grumbles that the modern-day MCU demands too much prior knowledge from its audience, Captain America: Brave New World absolutely insists you have a firm grasp on The Incredible Hulk. Yes, the 2008 one that saw Edward Norton leave the franchise before it even got started.
If, like me, The Incredible Hulk has yet to make your Letterboxd list, some head scratching awaits. Who’s the guy Tim Blake Nelson is playing? Why is Thaddeus Ross, now the President and played by Harrison Ford in place of the late William Hurt, agonising on his relationship with a daughter we never see? Why are we all here?
And before you turn your paper over on entry number 35 in the MCU, you’ll also need to swot up on Eternals and its small-screen cousin, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The former will explain the mass of strategically and narratively vital space rock sitting in the Pacific Ocean; the latter sets up Anthony Mackie’s new Captain America, Sam Wilson, and Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), his chirpy sidekick now promoted to Falcon duties.
Mackie makes an equally charismatic but much more mortal Captain America to Chris Evans’s Steve Rogers. His sense of inadequacy at replacing his serum-enhanced predecessor provides the movie’s best moment – a vulnerability that should be mirrored by Ross’s heartache over his estranged daughter, were she not marooned in a movie from 17 years ago.
But the ugly green-screen action sequences and a plot that does for multilateral treaties what The Phantom Menace did for the taxation of trade routes make minimal impression. Hopefully we won’t be called on to summon any of it up in the next MCU Phase 5 instalment.
‘Please don’t be boring,’ Nelson’s villain beseeches Wilson in a clutch moment. Who wants to tell him?
In cinemas worldwide Feb 14.