As the publicity campaign for Captain America: Civil War escalates through a deafening crescendo, two things are clear. First, the film will make ungodly amounts of money. And, second, as an action film, it will be mediocre.

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Fans will bristle at the suggestion that Marvel’s latest gigundous multiplex event can be anything but awesome in every way. But there’s plenty of evidence that Civil War will underwhelm. There have been 12 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) cross-continuity dynasty, and in quality, they’ve all varied between OK and worse than OK. There are enjoyable performances here and there – Robert Downey Jr, Chris Hemsworth and Scarlett Johansson are all entertaining actors who slip easily from humor to drama as the films require. But overall the movies are, collectively, a damp, drab, multibillion-dollar blot on pop culture.

This isn’t art cinema snobbery. Sure, it’s fun to compare Joss Whedon’s less than capable camera movement to Kurosawa’s, but even by the standards of American big-budget action movies, the MCU’s rippling sinews are puerile, and its thunderous explosions amount to a not-so-mighty pfft.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Guardians of the Galaxy: its world could be Houston. Photograph: Uncredited/AP

Consider visuals. None of the MCU films has a unique, or even engaging, visual style. The galaxy in Guardians of the Galaxy is remarkably bland: the capital on Xandar could just about be Houston. There’s nothing to compare with the original Star Wars’ dirty robots and desert planets, to say nothing of Blade Runner’s cluttered/empty future megalopolis.

The Dark World seems to be trying, and failing, to model itself on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, but in place of fully imagined realms, languages and cultures, you just get glimpses of half-assed CGI landscapes which are supposed to signify other dimensions. Compare Ultron’s design and impact with the fleshy, skin-falling-off-metal robotic nightmare of Terminator, or the smooth liquid metal killer of T2. Compare the alien invasion of Avengers with the gloriously tactile, ugly, oozing creatures of Alien, or even with the lumbering monsters of Pacific Rim. Artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko created distinct, dynamic, stylish fantasy images in their original Marvel comics. The MCU, in comparison, looks stock.

The stunts and fight scenes are similarly rote. Black Widow taking out a passel of villains while tied to a chair in Avengers is almost Jackie-Chan-worthy, but that’s a rare exception. For the most part, battles in the MCU involve people blasting each other over and over, CGI effects substituting for imagination, choreography, or character. There’s more invention in Jason Statham’s The Transporter, with its fights on oil slicks and inside buses, than in almost the entirety of the MCU – and that’s without even mentioning the set pieces in films like Kill Bill or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. The Matrix uses computer graphics to create martial arts that seem to crack the world apart; Die Hard focuses on improvisatory, barefoot mayhem. The MCU falls in the bland space in between, with fight scenes that are neither transcendent nor gritty. They’re simply there because someone needed a fight scene.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ant-Man: ‘The self-actualization of raffish white guy heroes.’ Photograph: Zade Rosenthal/Allstar/Disney

The surface half-assedness is mirrored by structural and thematic incoherence. Tragic backstories and heroic self-sacrifice proliferate, but they can’t quite conceal that the films, individually and collectively, lack both purpose and soul. Robocop 2 sneeringly embraces quasi-fascist police state brutality. The early Bond films are paeans to the suave brutality of imperialism. John Woo’s Face/Off pushes hero/villain duality to manic, cackling extremes; Fury Road is powered by a vision of patriarchy and resistance. In comparison, the MCU films are vacillating and feckless. Their main commitments seem to be to the self-actualization of raffish white guy heroes like Ant Man and Star-Lord and/or to vague brow-furrowing about government overreach. Too much power may corrupt, but then some hero with even more power will nobly save the day. That’s not much of an ethos to live by, or to build a film around.

It’s easy to make one mediocre movie. But when you make 12 of them in a row, it starts to raise questions. Surely at some point you’re bound to make a better-than-average film just by happenstance. Why are MCU films so consistently flat and uninspired, anyway?

Maybe it’s something about superhero films in general. Blade and the Christopher Reeves Superman both have their virtues, but it’s not like there are a plethora of great non-MCU superhero films out there. Or perhaps the MCU continuity could be a problem; lining up all the heroes and villains and plot points may leave little time for the more imaginative parts of film-making. Though, that doesn’t explain why the MCU Netflix series Jessica Jones has had a stronger point of view than the films, while Daredevil (despite other problems) has a more definitive visual style.

In the end, I doubt that superheroes or continuity is to blame for the underwhelming nature of the MCU. It’s more likely that the MCU is simply boring because those behind the MCU have decided, as a more or less conscious policy, to make the films boring. Moving away from blah visuals, action and plot would be a risk – and why take a risk when the movies rake in so much money? The MCU is the fast food of big-budget action: predictable, convenient, bland, but good enough if you like that sort of thing. Civil War will be more of the same. For those who want something better from their action film, you’ll need to check a movie theater in some other universe.