Captain America: Brave New World

Marked essential as Sam Wilson's first film in the role, and it is the Phase Five entry most damaged by its own production. Reporting described extensive reshoots across a long period, with characters removed and a villain's role reportedly reworked late, and the result is a film that never settles.

It assumes The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and, oddly, The Incredible Hulk, a 2008 film the franchise had ignored for seventeen years. General Ross is now the President, the plot turns on a substance from that film, and a character returns from it with a grievance seventeen years old.

What works is the premise underneath. A Black Captain America serving an administration he does not trust, who has no powers and is explicitly not a super-soldier, is a good idea, and the film's best scenes are Sam being told he is not Steve Rogers by people who mean it as an insult. Anthony Mackie is good and the material around him keeps retreating.

The thriller plot is competent and anonymous: a mind-control conspiracy, an assassination attempt, and an international dispute over an island. Harrison Ford's transformation in the last act is the sequence everybody came for and it is brief. Watch it for continuity.