Captain America: Civil War Review

The trick here is that both men are wrong. Tony Stark signs the accords out of guilt and Steve Rogers refuses them out of a distrust the previous film had earned, and the script keeps both positions plausible long enough for the fight between them to hurt. That is rare in this genre. The airport sequence is the studio's best action set piece, twelve characters with distinct powers, every one of them used cleverly, a joke landing every thirty seconds, and it stays legible from first shot to last.

Tom Holland arrives in three minutes and instantly recasts a role two other actors had already defined. Chadwick Boseman does more with silence than most of these leads do with pages of dialogue. The real engine is Daniel Bruhl's Zemo, a grieving man with no powers who wins by playing a video, and the final fight in the Siberian snow is small, ugly and personal. The problems are structural: the accords are never coherently explained, half the cast pick sides for reasons of convenience, and the picture is so crowded that Vision, Wanda and Rhodes receive injuries in place of arcs.