Captain America: The First Avenger isn’t bad. Neither is it great. It feels like a stepping stone to something larger (and it is), a story being told here and now only to fill out a collection. (It’s like that last Transformer you need to buy to make the larger robot. You’ve got all the other parts — head, arms, chest, and one leg — and you’d prefer to buy another Transformer, but gee whiz, you probably should just complete this Destructicon. So you suck it up and buy it make this film.)
Chris Evans plays the titular hero, who like many superheroes comes off a little stupid when his back-story is held up for two-hour scrutiny. (We tend to forget that our most beloved heroes each got a running start in some comic book, thrust into the fray, sink-or-swim, without time for back-story — and that even once they were established, their back-story wasn’t what kept kids coming back each issue. Put differently, superheroes just sort of are, so making a film about their origins as opposed to their daily antics can be risky business.)
Captain America (the film) is part WWII period piece, part modern superhero movie. The plot in brief: A scrawny weakling with a big heart tries repeatedly to volunteer for the army without success. His can-do jingoism and indomitable spirit catch the eye of a scientist, who brings him in to inject him with special serum (no spoilers here, folks, this is all trailer material). The film’s take on precisely how Capt. America gets into that silly outfit and out on the front lines is clever, and cuts about the only reasonable path through abundant rushes of stupidity. (It’s actually quite enjoyable to watch.) Hugo Weaving is pleasantly crazed as the worse-than-Nazi supervillain.
From here, the film goes through the motions. I don’t know. It’s fine. I didn’t get a whole lot out of the fighting scenes, and I can’t fathom why Nazis weren’t a good enough enemy for Capt. America in this film. (Always worked for Indy, seem to have worked in the original comics, so why not here?) The visuals are fun, though I’ve already confessed that I prefer bright colors and shiny objects to the dull, muted, Saving Private Ryan-type palette on offer here.
If you like grey-toned rough-hewn comic book soldiers roaring through forests on re-imagined motorbikes and battling faceless thugs with energy weapons from an unspecified occult-drunk Nazi breakaway sect, you’ll love Act Two. I don’t, so I didn’t.
High points of the film: Tommy Lee Jones is refreshing and delivers some good quips. The putative love interest is alright, though precisely why she and the Captain like one another isn’t really developed and I wasn’t sold on her appeal. I liked Howard Stark. And there’s a scene toward the end that has the magical effect of making us look on our current, technology-infused world with new wonder — and that’s always a neat experience.
So that’s the rub. As a hero, Captain America has always seemed a bit anachronistic. His baldfaced nationalism likely made sense in WWII, but plays a little silly today. He’s a well known hero, sure, but I’ve never been drawn into his world. Likewise, I just never really got on board with Evans in this film. It’s entertaining stuff, but ultimately, for me, not especially relevant.
That said, if you are a fan of Captain America you’ll probably love this movie. It does a solid and decent job with its material (compare: Green Lantern) while doing what is necessary to lay the groundwork for the coming Avengers film. Perhaps because of this it felt a bit rote, a bit like cinematic whack-a-mole. But it’s done, the mole is whacked, and now we can sit back and wait for what’s next. Hopefully it’s worth it.
HAUS VERDICT: A decent superhero pic that does a smart job with a silly back-story; watchable, but nothing spectacular. A stepping stone.
See what the other half thinks: Parsi’s view.
I watched this today and enjoyed it more than I thought I would. Definitely some silliness (the crazy blue weapons seemed like they would do more than make people who would normally be dead be like, totally obliterated dead, but no, just good-looking effects), but it was fun. I also loved that there was an Asian in the cast. I don’t think anyone really expected more than one token black guy to show up in a WW2 movie.