Why is the Red Hulk red?
It doesn’t matter. Then again, almost nothing we do these days seems to. So, we may as well ask whatever is on our minds, right?
Given that gamma radiation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has canonically turned folks green, why does it turn Harrison Ford red in Captain America: Brave New World? The film’s bad guy, The Leader (Tim Blake Nelson), gets funky puke-green acne from the radiation.
Why is the Red Hulk red?!
This is isn’t some stupid hangup. This is evidence. This is the thread that, when pulled, unravels the entire ugly sweater that is this pointless, drab, exhausting entry into a series for which many haters have been sharpening knives. Somewhere in the (allegedly) massive reshoots by director Julius Onah, somewhere in what had to be a truly ugly Google document used by five credited screenwriters, they just forgot to include a single throwaway line about why the new brute is like a mood ring.
Maybe it got lost amid all the other exposition? Brave New World is a direct sequel to 2008’s Incredible Hulk that took a detour through a bunch of Avengers movies, the film Chloé Zhao made after she won an Oscar, and the fourth (or fifth) best Marvel Disney+ show. There is a lot of stuff to catch folks up on, which is why Ford’s character President Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross says things like “Where’s Betty, my daughter?” That’s a casual thing people do, right? They frequently refer to someone by both their name and familial relationship when talking to someone, right?
The movie makes a wink-and-nod acknowledgement that Ford took over for William Hurt, who played Ross in the Incredible Hulk but has no time to explain why the Red Hulk is red. It also features one of those plots that confuses things happening for a nuanced story. The actual story itself is like one sentence: the new Captain America (Anthony Mackie) tries to help the President secure a peace treaty, but then the President becomes a Hulk. Who is red. For no reason.
There are other things that happen. There’s some kind of double-crossing bad guy deal that means Mackie has to punch Giancarlo Esposito for a while. Someone new took over the mantle of the Falcon so that the Falcon could become the new Captain America. The original super soldier, Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), gets brainwashed into doing bad stuff completely by accident. The exciting, franchise-advancing development is that they found a new kind of metal.
Most comic book stuff is gibberish, but it is the good kind of gibberish. This is the bad kind. This is the kind where you see the gruesome stitches where they tried to tie together the loose flesh of a film stitched together with random discarded parts.
What’s crazy is how vibrant, vital, and salient Brave New World could have been. A Black man takes over the mantle of a beloved white icon who only became an icon because of a Black man who underwent experiments and imprisonment. That is heavy stuff. But Mackie barely gets to talk about it because everyone is too busy saying what’s happening so that the audience “doesn’t get lost.”
Harrison Ford tries very hard here. That’s a rare and beautiful thing! He isn’t phoning it in. He goes for it. And nobody could be bothered to even explain why his Red Hulk is red. Ford, Mackie, and Lumbly are all quite good here. It is just everything else that’s bad.
Redundant, uninspiring fight scenes clash with spotty CGI in service of a script that clearly went out of its way to say nothing of significance. When one issue of a comic is bad, it’s no biggie. You just wait a month or less, and maybe your favorite hero does something less lame. That is a lot of pressure to put on Thunderbolts*, even if it does have Florence Pugh. The death of the MCU has been greatly exaggerated, and RDJ’s turn as Dr. Doom lurks in the wings. That decision now makes a lot more sense, given what Brave New World hath wrought.
Grade = D
Other Critical Voices to Consider
Siddhant Adlakha at Joy Sauce says “To present optimism as a hero draped in red, white and blue making the case for sweeping torture under the rug is at best an outcome of messy and thoughtless filmmaking. However, the result is ugly nonetheless, and it’s the closest thing the movie and its title character have to an actual ethos.”
Sarah G. Vincent says the film “comes out on the heels of an inauguration and goes into full bootlicking mode about respecting the President regardless of who holds the office and fangirling over getting to go to the White House. Who is this movie supposed to be appeal to? Younger people who want to enjoy a comic book movie. They are not the demographic to sympathize with a parent who is estranged from a child without expressing skepticism or just respect an office over the ideal principles that created it. The writers were really straddling the fence, and appealing to Presidon’t supporters is useless. They will just hate this movie for the same reason that they hated Obamacare—its association with people of color even if it benefits them. I hope that I am wrong because if this movie does not do well, the blame will fall on Mackie, not on a writing team so lukewarm they would make Jesus spit.”
Ian Thomas Malone says “Despite a budget of close to 200 million, the MCU has rarely felt smaller than Brave New World, which often feels like an episode of The West Wing without any of the quippy writing or coherent plot progression. The special effects look ugly. A confrontation between the American and Japanese navies lacks any stakes, coming across as decidedly cheap.”