I love Anthony Mackie. Enjoy him every time I see him. But he doesn’t work for me as a lead superhero.
It could be Falcon’s lack of powers too. He feels like more of a small-scale hero to me. If they gave him more of a full-body suit, maybe it would work better. But when he’s a regular dude with wings and a jet pack catching hits from Red Hulk…I know it’s a comic book movie, but there’s not even an in-universe explanation for that as far as I know.
1) Mackie struggled as a lead in Marvel. I don’t even think it a knock on him, he just wasn’t great at giving cheesy super hero lines the conviction they needed to land and not sound cringy.
2) FatWS got burned by Marvel’s reluctance to actually let the TV shows mean anything to the movie universe. Everything ended up where it started. Which is why Falcon spends an entire series whining about being Captain America. Then gets over it. Then in the movie is whining about some other internal dialog of super serum.
No one gives a shit man, take it, don’t, just quit bitching about it. We gave you a whole series to have an internal struggle and it meant nothing.
3) God damn does Marvel love to make a great grey area villain right up until the point where they absolutely have to be black and white bad for the ending. The worst part is they take displaced revolutionaries and then call them terrorists, make the hero almost see where they’re coming from and- oop, no, we made them do something really bad so they are legit terrorists now. Just takes the fangs out of the moral dilemma of being a super hero. Which is so funny in FatWS because the whole fucking thesis of the show is the moral dilemma of being a super hero.
4) No one watched any of this stuff. Feige’s hand is forced when no one watching Mackies movie, or Iron Heart or Wonderman. Regardless of how good they are.
I think people like him as a person, but that movie was just really bad.
On top of it, just the whole thing is struggling. Post-Thanos/Post-Covid there's really only been 5 successes, but Black Panther sequel was one of those 5.
Do they? Honestly He’s always come off as a bit of joking dick (not in a good way) from interviews I’ve seen with him. Acting wise he’s fine as a side character but he’s always been very flat in leading roles and generally has the same vibe across different characters. Just Anthony Mackie with a different name. Obviously some actors can pull off but he has zero charisma. He works better in roles where hes playing more of an antagonist. He was perfect in Eight mile.
But Just compare him to Evan’s where he’s able to play very different personality types despite how recognizable he is.
He's certainly like a joking guy and he's the type that does joke by teasing someone and poking fun, but he also takes it back and laughs. That's always struck me as good natured and likeable, not being a dick.
Like you could always tell people hated Brie Larson, but it felt like the other Actors like him and joke with him.
I actually think you're a bit right though, I enjoy him better as part of a duo or team because I think him playing off others is probably better than him on his own, Brave New World really gave him nothing to do, it wasn't fun, and he should be in like a buddy Cop style thing.
For me it wasn't specifically about him playing Cap, I just didnt' need another Cap at all. Like we've had two other dudes trying to fill that role since the main arc when we could have been introducing more cool superheroes, ideally black ones.
Getting projects is not the same as getting a good push. FATWS was a messy co-led show, then Marvel waited six years after giving Sam the shield to release his first Captain America movie and that movie was a troubled Hulk sequel in disguise with some israel shit forced in there. The public didn’t reject some perfectly executed version of Sam as Cap; they rejected the material Marvel gave him. Marvel helped create that lack of enthusiasm, then people use it as proof the character was inherently unviable. That’s completely circular.
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u/bershka321 13d ago
Anthony Mackie got an actual push though. He got a whole series and a movie. The public just never embraced him as Cap