Captain America: Civil War
TBC. 146 MINS. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo CAST Chris Evans, Robert Downey Jr., Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johansson, Chadwick Boseman, Elizabeth Olsen, Anthony Mackie, Daniel Brühl
After Captain America sidekickturned-assassin Bucky Barnes (Stan) resurfaces, tensions between Steve Rogers (Evans) and Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) turn into a full-on Avengers schism. hen the Avengers first assembled four years ago, it felt like a grand culmination, the ultimate Marvel superhero event: its Big Four characters united (well, eventually) against a colossal planetary threat. since then, the studio’s ever-expanding Cinematic Universe has delivered sequels of varying quality and introduced new heroes in stand-alone movies (well, as close to stand-alone as Marvel can ever get), but it’s never quite matched the ensemble-balancing finesse and earth-quaking-action scale of Joss Whedon’s initial assembling. Certainly not in his clunkier, team-gathering follow up, Age Of Ultron. Until now.
Captain America: Civil War is the best Marvel studios movie yet. there, we said it. First, and most importantly, it does what the best Marvel films do: juggling multiple characters so each is allowed its moment in a story that pushes forward the series’ overall continuity, while also forming and concluding its own cogent plot. so here scarlet Witch (elizabeth Olsen) wrestles with the consequences of her immense power; vision (Paul Bettany) starts getting to grips with being ‘human’; Black Widow (scarlett Johansson) finds herself torn when the battle line is drawn; and supposed retiree hawkeye (Jeremy renner) just can’t stay out of the fight. even Paul rudd’s Ant-man receives more than a tokenistic ‘hey it’s him!’ cameo, and in spectacle terms at least, is given the film’s biggest scene.
then there are the new recruits: Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman,
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