Thanks, I Hate It: Captain America: Civil War

Writing film crit about the Marvel Cinematic Universe is sort of like trying to scale a sheer thirty-foot wall built around a vacant lot: difficult and unrewarding. Kevin Feige's near-algorithmic house style is so visually, audibly, and thematically lukewarm as to provide no real handhold  for analysis, and few of the series' entries have problems distinct from any other. The aimless camera, tepid, quippy dialogue, and lifeless special effects all run together after a while. 

Captain America: Civil War manages to stand out not because it's exceptional in any way but because it foregoes even the basic connective tissue used to hold the series' other films together. It's an endless procession of stage-setting and forced character introductions which sap any possible emotional depth from the movie's many action sequences. The much-promoted parking lot fight in Civil War's second act is one of the most bloodlessly tedious in any modern blockbuster, the costumes and choreography as bland as the washed-out gray set. Everything is relentlessly stop-and-start, no punch complete without a nerdbait shot of some piece of comic book ephemera or a quip straight from the Joss Whedon School of Arch Remarks.

Spider-Man (Tom Holland) and Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) are introduced as kind of an extended commercial for the MCU's upcoming projects, the interdependent nature of the films weighing the whole thing down to such an extent that it feels like the two first acts of separate movies hastily welded together for an airless third. Antagonist Helmut Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) adds little to the proceedings, his vendetta against the Avengers morally muddled and rendered unsympathetic by his work as a secret police interrogator in his fictional Eastern Bloc homeland. Why build a plot around the series' protagonists facing the consequences of their own legacy of mass destruction if you're going to make it immediately clear that they're blameless, their enemy more or less a Nazi? 

It's not that a black and white moral conflict is out of place for the MCU, or even that it's necessarily bad. It's the movie's attempts to position itself as the Thinking Man's comic book flick that really render its plot intolerable. The thick, chewy twaddle Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) volley back and forth at one another is a morass of half-baked lone wolf patriotism and establishment collaboration filtered through a handful of consummately dull exchanges punctuated by underlit, cheap-looking fights. The whole thing feels like a first draft, like everyone turned something in on time and the whole studio just decided "eh, good enough."