While Thor and the Hulk were away enjoying themselves in last year's gargantuan goof-off Thor: Ragnarok, the remaining Avengers were working through an almighty playground tiff. In theory, the throughline of Civil War, the third Captain America movie after 2011's limp origin story The First Avenger and 2014's vastly improved The Winter Soldier, is a growing split within the ranks of the home team. On one side, there is Robert Downey Jr.'s arms-dealing free marketeer Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man, who - in an uncharacteristic reversal, not terribly well explained in this script - has decided it's time for the Avengers to be made subject to third-party oversight; on the other, Chris Evans's previously moderate, old-school Steve Rogers, a.k.a. the Captain, who insists everyone should carry on much as before. In practice, for at least sixty of its 150 minutes, the film plays out like a noisier, not much more enthralling version of the any other business section at your local bowls club's annual general meeting.
This was the first of the thirteen Marvel Cinematic Universe titles that I'd left to the home entertainment sector - a combination of Euro 2016 and life meant I missed Civil War upon its initial theatrical outing - and small-screen viewing only pointed up what thin gruel these features are: once the spectacle that sends devotees scurrying to the IMAX on the opening weekend dwindles, these films really do amount to a whole lot of nothing. There is, granted, a new tension within the web of MCU enterprises, which follows from their very interconnectedness: what may seem to more forgiving fans like a suspension of the usual rules of narrative engagement will likely appear to everybody else as the kind of flouting and can-kicking to which corporate ventures have always been prone. Twenty minutes into Civil War, we're whisked off to a funeral for a character (Hayley Atwell's Peggy Carter) who hasn't appeared in the film and, in fact, died somewhere else in the universe; subsequent events overlap with the narrative of this year's Black Panther; and at one point, we're even introduced to a plucky young fellow by the name of Peter Parker (Tom Holland, in his first outing as Spider-Man).
In short, these movies now only make complete narrative and emotional sense if you've brought into them as a package - a calculated, non-creative executive decision that sits closer to Stark's cutthroat capitalism than Rogers' compassionate conservatism, and which, on a basic level, demands the viewer hands over £30 rather than £10 to make head or tail of what's going on. Granted, you get more sprawl for your money, if sprawling is what you seek from your leisure time. The films' narrative diffuseness is rivalled only by their geographical diffuseness: this one leaps, with neither rhyme, reason nor visible onscreen jetlag, from Lagos to Bucharest to Berlin, destinations connected by nothing other than that they're all viable overseas territories. One of the reasons The Winter Soldier compelled so was that it spun a comparably self-contained Washington conspiracy yarn, one that could have occupied a single season of TV's Homeland. Civil War might have achieved something similar by locking Tony and the Cap'n in a room for two hours to sort out their differences, yet its mind and feet keep wandering elsewhere: for most of its first half, Cap is heading off in pursuit of boring old Bucky (Sebastian Stan), an escapee from the previous film, who never seems more than an inconsequential and aggravatingly tedious loose end.
You lose track of the fine actors - Hope Davis, John Slattery, William Hurt et al. - caught begging for scraps from the Marvel table to feed their families while the camera returns to Evans, whose baby-Costner handsomeness hasn't become any less bland or more interesting with age, and Stan, who seems no more or less anonymous whenever Bucky deigns to pop his helmet off. The insistence on keeping every character in play stems from a wider desire to sustain a wildly profitable yet grindingly monotonous formula: a setpiece every half-hour, no matter that it may be entirely devoid of peril so long as our heroes have powers enough to see off the gravest threat. Even when turned against themselves, these action figures would rather toss out glib, easily deflected quips than anything truly wounding. You can stay to the end of the end credits, and nobody - not even the film's pallid villain-in-chief (Daniel Brühl, at his most Brühlest) - dies: the board is reset, the pieces readied to go again, for a price. Again, I don't doubt you could admire the logistical savvy and technical clout, the sheer empty scale of it, but I will go into this week's Avengers: Infinity War, the next great synergasm of 21st century American cinema, clutching only to the vain hope that something will happen to shake this series up - and a newfound respect for those 20th century action movies that used their two hours to tell one story involvingly and conclusively.
Captain America: Civil War is now available to stream on Netflix.
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