SPOILERS BELOW
What a slog. It is somehow all story and yet barely anything happens. It's just constant catch-up, there was exposition still happening in the last scene! Just to open the movie it has to go through 'hey, here's Sam, he's Cap now, you knew that; but also Ross is recast and has no moustache and is the president now; and also meet Joaquin, he's been training up as the Falcon; and also Celestial Island has adamantium in it and there's an accord being crawn up around it; and also Carl Lumbly is back and has been training Sam'. Then they get to stuff that's actually happening during the story rather than before it, and there's two new villains to introduce, a couple of White House characters, catch-up on Bucky (he's running for congress now, whoops, back to catching you up on inter-movie events again). And you've got Samuel Sterns (we also have to get caught up with his inter-movie stuff but at least we're learning that along with Sam) running a very similar scheme to Zemo in Civil War which is actually pretty simple but busied up with a load of details to make it seem smart and complex. But after all this, the story is basically: Sterns wants to ruin Ross' legacy by making him hulk out; he succeeds. The end. The only wrinkle is that thanks to Sam interfering, he has to turn himself in as part of a Plan B (this doesn't really make sense, incidentally - all he needed to do was release a statement and hack some White House speakers, would have arguably been easier not to turn himself in) and so he's neatly dealt with before the end of the movie. Otherwise we're back to where we started - as we find out in the final scene exposition dump of offscreen events from Sam, Ross isn't president again, everyone else is where they were at the beginning of the movie.
The action is kinda bog-standard Cap/Falcon stuff, it just washed over me. There's only one Hulk sequence (and they cut away for the transformations!) where he smashes up a few choppers, knocks Cap around a bit on an empty street, we've seen it all before with Banner but bigger and better. The writing is mostly dull with some shitty Marvel banter. It looks bland as hell. Mackie doesn't have chemistry with anyone, Ford and Nelson are good but underused. Waiting until the exact moment when Ross is recast to do a movie based around him and big surprising changes happening to him is a dreadful idea, up there with John Connor in Terminator Genesys, as is making plot elements of this so close to Civil War. The whole thing feels like a placeholder to get us to the reacquired from 20th Century Fox characters stage, and is utterly dull.
Rating: terrible.
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