My full review of Civil War. This may change after seeing it a second time though.
What a mess. When I saw the positive reviews I knew that this must be something great, maybe even on par with the excellent Winter Soldier. Sadly I was wrong.
What worked: Black Panther and Spider-Man are really great, and all the scenes with them are the best scenes in the film. Some (not all) of the action was fun, particularly the opening action scene involving Crossbones. All the direction was pretty good, and the actors all did a good job with what they were given.
What didn’t work: This movie has way too many characters, I thought Age of Ultron was overstuffed. What’s even worse is that only Cap and Iron Man have anything to do. Bucky is a plot device, Scarlet Witch and Vision have the barest of arcs, and everyone else (apart from Spidey and Black Panther) don’t get anything to do and are thrown in for no reason. The color palette was so bland and boring, the CGI is cartoonish and fake looking, the action is over the top yet extremely tedious to watch. That’s actually a good description of this film. It’s tedious. I have never felt more bored watching a comic book movie. The villain is one of the worst in the MCU yet, and that’s saying something. He only interacted with out heroes once! The music is bland as hell, but then again every superhero film has bland music. Iron Man and Cap were both going through the exact same arc as in their last respective solo films, and I didn’t care about either when they were forced to fight. I felt apathy when Cap threw down his shield because neither of the characters did anything to make us care about them beyond being the same characters from other, better films.
This film is so overrated. Don’t trust the critics.