Captain America: Brave New World - 6/10
This is just barely a 6 and very nearly a 5 but i think it gets just enough thats atleast visually interesting, namely in the climax, to feel more positive than neutral about it. That said I'll probably spend most of this post shitting on because there's a lot to improve.
At a broad stroke level excluding Ross no characters in this film are interesting and this is especially true for Mackee. Now its hard to put his head on a pike here because the reshoots really expose the bad writing. They clearly restructured this film at least once and the solution was to bring Mackee in and have him give exposition in really flat scenes. He has 2 or 3 of these in the film. Just Mackee and a character explaining details that were cut from a movie we'll never see but we still need to get the plot to work. So its hard to blame Mackee for a flat performance when the writing forces him to Exposition-Man. Regardless his performance is never interesting. Ever.
He's a sidekick and he feels like it and his sidekicks feel laughable. The film has an insistence that being just a man is a boon for his symbolism. That by not being a superhero he's superheroic. That his greatest power is he's uninteresting. I dont think anyone is actually going to be duped into thinking this actually a laudable trait but there's a scene where his sidekick tells him how much he idolizes Falcon and its just preposterous. "Ya know what my favorite part of super hero movies are? When normal people are the focus!" Said no one ever.
I really liked that this is fundamentally a sequel to The Incredible Hulk and i think it did a decent job at fullfilling that. Though the reshoots show their head here too. We know that Carlos Esposito's role was entirely done in reshoots. So thats about a third of the film. His role replaced Seth Rollins role. Sidewinder is fairly good here i thought but it does demonstrate what was cut. Third act has a huge exposition dump between Sidewinder and Falcon where he lays out The Leaders plan and then Flacon just shows up randomly to where the leader is and has him arrested. There's also a scene where the Leader shows up at an admirals house with no context. This to me clearly demonstrates a lot of what was cut was a leader subplot. We're left with enough to have a functional plot but its a rough edit.
The visual iconography of the Red Hulk fight is pretty fucking epic though. Fighting on the top of the White House as it crumbles beneath Rulk's feet. Using an American Flag as a javelin to hurl through a helicopter...its really badass. Im definitely disappointed they didnt explore Rulks powers though. His heat is a significant part of Red Hulk and it wouldve been nice to have had it on screen.
There's a final case of massive reshoots in the finale. The speech Falcon gives Rulks to talk him down was clearly shot way later. The background detail of Rulk clearly has significant time out into it. Meanwhile Mackees portion is very sloppy and low detail and as the scene is a two shot over the shoulder it visually incredibly jarring every time they cut to Mackee. You smell the lack of money.
tl;dr
The film is a mess but there's some decent ideas here. I dont think Mackee works as a leading man and would strongly recommend either recasting him or strictly use him in buddy cop/team-up movies so he can do what Mackee can actually do: be a sidekick.