YOU SPELLED DISNEY WRONG, BUT OTHER THAN THAT, SPOT ON: Marvel Is Now a Giant Slop Machine.

Even at the level of base genre pleasures, Brave New World feels more obligatory than exciting. It seems hard to remember now, but once upon a time these Marvel movies staged action in fast, funny, creative ways, utilizing cutting-edge visual effects to realize their superheroes’ unique abilities. Nowadays, more often than not, we get dull, derivative drudgery — a symptom perhaps of familiarity (there have been 35 of these movies so far) but also an overwhelming sense of box-checking that’s settled in over the past few years. Is it that they’ve all just done every move, every kick, every punch, every launch to death? Last year, Deadpool v. Wolverine provided Marvel with a much-needed mega-hit, but even that felt like a knowing nod to the fact that the studio had run out of ideas. That film succeeded by poking fun at its very existence. So, uh, what do the other films do now?

To its credit, Brave New World does okay with the fights themselves — the stuntwork is effective, and there’s still fun to be had with the way Captain America throws that shield around, plus now he’s also got those Falcon wings — but its dogfights and more VFX-heavy sequences are so lifeless and tiresome that I felt my eyes drifting closed a couple of times. By the time Ross actually turned into Red Hulk, I started to imagine a Has Fallen series entry in which slobby retired Secret Service agent Gerard Butler had to protect President Red Hulk from a gaggle of murderous goons. Is there a worse sign for a film than for the viewer to start imaging other, similarly mediocre films they could be watching instead?

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One can squint at times to try and see the movie Captain America: Brave New World maybe wanted to be — not so much a replay of the old Chris Evans Captain America films and more a shorter, tighter, close-quarters action flick, one without any alien invasions or heavy fantasy elements, one in which the villains wear suits and hoodies and use guns and fists instead of space weapons and whatnot. One without any epic quests for magic elements, the video-game conceit that was already tired a decade ago and yet still drives so many action movies today. And certainly, the concept of a hero who uses his wits and his courage instead of a special serum would have fit in nicely with that approach. But somewhere along the way, the whole thing appears to have spun out of control into the confused and shallow mess that we have before us. It’s enough to make one wonder if, given the level of interference and second-guessing involved, Marvel could ever make such a movie. Victims of their own success, they’ve somehow turned their vaunted production enterprise into a giant slop machine.

Marvel Comics movies, the Star Wars franchise, the turgid reboots of beloved old Disney movies. Uber-Woke Disney ruins everything it touches. The Critical Drinker is appropriately merciless in his review, including noting the movie’s depiction of a “totally implausible David and Goliath war between America and Japan, when China would have been a much more plausible rival. But then again, we wouldn’t want to offend one of Disney’s biggest potential markets, now would we?”

Earlier: Disney’s Pipeline Still Clogged With Woke. “Disney is in a weird place right now. They’ve sort of, kind of, announced that (like most of the rest of corporate America) they’re backing away from wokeness, to the extent that they’re cutting woke storylines from Pixar properties, and Disney was able to course correct in enough time to make Moana 2 and Inside Out 2 big hits last year (plus Deadpool & Wolverine, which I suspect was too rude to ever be infected with wokeness), but the company itself is still infected with DEI, and they still have an awful lot of very expensive turds, conceived and crafted in the woke era, sliding down the alimentary release canal.”