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‘Captain America: Brave New World’ Review: Anthony Mackie Takes Up the Shield in a Franchise Time Filler That’s Just Fun Enough
Mackie's slyly dogged Captain America has less superpower than his predecessor, and so does this movie. But it does wriggle out of superhero fatigue.
And watching Anthony Mackie launch his first solo flight as Sam Wilson, who has taken over the Captain American mantle from Chris Evans’s Steve Rogers, you may be struck by how much the character now seems like a scaled-down superhero for an MCU whose glory days are behind it. You could say that that makes him a hero more comparable to, say, Iron Man (though Tony Stark’s principal weapon was Robert Downey Jr.’s motormouth), and Wilson’s all-too-mortal quality comes through in the sly doggedness of Mackie’s when-you’re-number-two-you-try-harder performance. As Ruth Bat-Seraph, an Israeli former Black Widow who was a Mossad agent in the comics and is now the president’s head of security (which hasn’t stopped pro-Palestinian protesters from objecting to her presence), Shira Haas is like Billie Eilish playing Mata Hari.
Or read this on Variety
