His slightly slimy government bureaucrat, who will supposedly play a larger role in the upcoming Black Panther movie, is one of those welcome sights, a reminder that we live in a world where everyone gets to be in a superhero movie at some point. And with Martin Freeman's Everett Ross.įreeman is just one of several terrific actors populating the sidelines of Civil War (and it warms my heart to see him essentially recycling his American accent from FX's Fargo series). Now, he gets to spend who-kn0ws-how-long alone with his pain. The last-minute intervention of Black Panther ensures that he gets sent to prison instead, where he faces a more tragic ending. Knowing that he's broken the Avengers' bonds into a thousand pieces, he's perfectly comfortable putting a gun to his head and ending it all. His ending is tragic and worthy of an actor as strong as Brühl. And like those two, he's not afraid to break a few eggs to get there. He's about as far from his comic book counterpart as you can get (I miss the purple balaclava, personally), but he's the kind of string-pulling puppet master a movie like this needs. As Helmut Zemo, the wonderful Daniel Brühl is one of the best MCU villains in ages, the kind of bad guy whose motivation is so crystal clear, so understandable, and so human that it's hard to argue with his mission. The ensemble of Captain America: Civil War is terrific before you even get to the guys and gals in spandex. It wants you to debate the what it means to be a superhero. Civil War is fine popcorn entertainment, but there's meat on the bone. I've had to discuss this film in the context of the "real world" and the context of Marvel Universe, because the same rules don't necessarily apply to both. Both sides are right and both sides are wrong. Tony is letting guilt blind him to the bigger picture. Steve values a single friend over the lives of countless innocent people. Tony Stark is putting his faith in a broken system. Since seeing Civil War on Thursday, I've spoken about the choices Steve and Tony make throughout the film and I've encountered a smorgasbord of differing opinions and arguments. It's a question of what you genuinely think is right. And that discussion isn't a matter of which side is cooler or which side has collected the better heroes. The greatest trick Civil War pulls is that it allows you to leave the theater and actually discuss whether or not you're Team Cap or Team Iron Man. That's always been the appeal of Marvel comics, it was the appeal of the Avengers movies, and now, thanks to a cohesive movie universe where audiences understand the dynamics of everyone on screen, it's the appeal of even the solo MCU movies. The point is that Civil War feels like the best kind of a crossover, the best kind of main event – it brings everyone together for a purpose that is too big for one story and lets this diverse collection of characters bounce off of one another for two hours.
If this version of Civil War existed on the page, the regular Ant-Man series would take a break from whatever story it was telling to explore how Scott Lang ended up in Berlin. However, it carries the energy of a comic book crossover, telling the broad strokes of the main event and allowing us peeks at the margins, the invisible one-shot tie-ins that fill in the blanks. However, it does ignore how all of those moving parts, all of those smart people sitting around in rooms putting their heads together, have built a machine that gets the job done better than just about anyone else in Hollywood these days.Īs its title implies, Captain America: Civil War is a Captain America movie first and foremost (and we'll get to that in a moment). The Marvel Studios movies have been accused of being entertainment created by committee, movies crafted by an industrial machine, and that accusation isn't entirely off-base. And, of course, the actors themselves (even those with significantly less screen time than their co-stars) make the material sing. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo were tasked with finding a way to make each and every one of those characters feel vital to the plot, to let them carry weight alongside the people more central to the conflict at hand. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were tasked with finding a way for a dozen Avengers and a dozen more allies and enemies to end up tangled in the same web. This is a case where the credit must be given to a number of parties.