Captain America: Civil War

As tedious and uninvolving as its immediate predecessor, Captain America: Civil War follows Chris Evans’ title character as he’s forced to battle fellow Avenger Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) over a political dispute involving the forced regulation of superheroes. There’s ultimately little within Captain America: Civil War‘s ridiculous 146 minute running time that wholeheartedly works, as directors Joe and Anthony Russo, working from a screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have suffused the proceedings with one half-baked, less-than-engrossing subplot after another – which ensures, to an increasingly distressing extent, that the movie suffers from an almost total lack of forward momentum (ie it clumsily lurches from one broadly-conceived action set-piece to the next). It is, as such, not surprising to note that the efforts of an extremely capable cast fall flat, with most of the movie’s performers trapped in the confines of one-dimensional, hopelessly underdeveloped characters. (This is especially true of the film’s unwarranted emphasis on Sebastian Stan’s tedious Winter Soldier.) Captain America: Civil War‘s lackluster vibe is compounded by the Russos mishandling of virtually all of its action sequences, as the filmmaking siblings’ obvious discomfort with such moments (eg shaky camerawork, rapid-fire editing, etc) drains them of both their impact and their coherence. The much-ballyhooed battle royale that occurs around the halfway mark is admittedly quite spectacular, although it is, in retrospect, fairly obvious that the entire sequence could’ve been lifted out of the narrative with little negative impact. (This is to say nothing of the shoehorning-in of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man.) And while the climactic fight between Evans and Downey Jr’s respective characters is understated and intelligible, Captain America: Civil War has long-since confirmed its place as just another loud, overblown Marvel misfire – with the continued failure of these movies especially disappointing given the potential afforded by the larger-than-life characters.

** out of ****