Get the latest gossip

Sabra Isn’t Controversial in Captain America: Brave New World. She’s Boring.


Why adapt an Israeli superhero destined for controversy and then just avoid defining her at all?

Airborne in a costume spangled with six-pointed stars, she fires poisonous “energy quills.” (An editor’s note explains that “Sabra,” a local prickly pear, is slang for “native-born Israeli.”) She accuses Hulk of an alliance with masked Muslim terrorists who blow up a café. The movie does not want Ruth defined by her source material, her nationality, her comics history as a Mossad agent, or the furor around her inclusion that led to protests at this week’s premiere. By now, she has a blunt murdered-son backstory: “The Arabs killed him on his school bus.” Already vengeful, she’s mind-controlled into an assassination attempt on the prime minister (which mirrors a Brave New World subplot about hypnotized gunmen in the White House, though the movie’s Ruth never gets brainwashed).

Get the Android app

Or read this on VULTURE

Read more on:

Photo of sabra

sabra