My blood feud with director Joe Johnston is well-documented around critical circles so asking me to review Captain America: The First Avenger is like asking Dexter Morgan to review Arthur Mitchell’s new movie and somehow go into it with an open mind. So, sitting down in that Raleigh movie theater at 9:00 in the morning with bloodshot eyes because I live in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with the nearest major city where I can see advance screenings is several hours away I cannot honestly say I was expecting to like Marvel’s new 2-hour Avengers promo. The surprise I’m finding as I write this review is that I really can’t think of numerous criticisms for it.
Except for one.
A big one. One that pretty much takes two stars off its score and that I’ll talk about later.
It starts out in the present day Assassin’s Creed style and honest to God for about five minutes I thought I had stumbled into the wrong theater. It looked oddly similar to those The Thing trailers popping up, where scientists are traipsing around the frozen wastelands of Antarctica (as usual) and for a few minutes I was genuinely happy that I wouldn’t have to sit through another fucking comic book movie. Alas, it was not to be, and a few seconds later our two scientists are staring down at the iconic shield buried in the ice and dumbly asking “Where’s the owner?” about as casually as finding a fucking wallet on the floor.
This is normally the part where I recap the plot, but considering that this is a Marvel movie then that seems about as frivolous as telling you the sun comes up in the morning. Why don’t we all sing along? A 90-pound weakling with no physical skills whatsoever but makes up for it with his big heart is harassed by bullies and tries to join the military where he’s struck down by an overly stereotypical military leader played by Tommy Lee Jones, who overacts so much that he’d probably fit better in a Saturday Night Live skit. However, because he’s a nice guy or some shit, the 90-pound weakling Steve Rogers (who wins the title for Most Uncreative Name Ever) is selected to be injected with super soldier serum that will turn him into a male model.
The wings on his helmet make him go faster.
I’m not really sure I agree with the qualifications for being eligible as a test subject for a super soldier serum. I highly doubt that when the CIA or FBI are recruiting for covert soldiers and special agents that “general big heartedness” is exactly very high on the priorities list. Regardless, Rogers is turned into a superhero using the same magical formula that for some reason turned Hugo Weaving into a cartoon villain, then is made to sell war bonds instead of fighting in the battles for some of the most poorly justified reasons I’ve ever heard. It kind of reminds me of those bits in the Crysis games where the military is trying to kill you despite the fact that you’re the only thing that stands in the way between them and a horde of hostile aliens hellbent on their destruction.
Steve finally comes to learn how to use his newfound ability to be incredibly handsome when he has to break his posse out of a Hydra (the comic book movie equivalent of Nazis, I guess) prison camp in what serves as the film’s best sequence. It doesn't overdo it on the CGI and it definitely gets a plus in that regard. It's a shame that these moments are about as fleeting and brief as a Star Trek fan's sex life. And while I respect the idea of giving the film a retro feel and using as much green screen as possible ala Indiana Jones, it doesn’t change the fact that green screen looks like shit when compared to good old physical sets.
Now that that’s out of the way, I guess I should get around to actually reviewing it. So, is Captain America bad? No. Well, is Captain America good? Also no.
You know those little paint-by-numbers books you had when you were little (or your first year in college if you were a little behind the rest of us) where you basically just matched up the numbers with different colors? Well that’s the best way to describe Captain America. There is absolutely nothing you haven’t seen before. It’s as if Joe Johnston just took all the pieces out of every other comic book movie ever, threw them in a giant machine, and this thing popped out. That’s why I really can’t think of any major criticisms for it besides the fact that it’s so generic that it’s really not worth seeing. True, it doesn’t make any major mistakes besides its hilariously rushed ending that condenses about a half-hour’s worth of material into ten minutes but that’s only because it doesn’t take any risks, either. You never have to worry about missing a shot if you never take any and that’s a lesson that Joe Johnston seems perfectly fine with taking to heart.
So THAT'S what happened to the All-Spark the last two 'Transformers' movies...
The acting’s solid and Chris Evans actually does a decent job in the title role. He doesn’t have the same problem Ryan Reynolds did in Green Lantern where you could never shake the idea that you were just watching some celebrity in cosplay. Evans actually embodies the hero quite nicely and even after he gets turned into a 6-foot 4-inch version of me he still feels like that little skinny weakling whose ass we spent the first 45 minutes watching get kicked (however, I do have a complaint: why does he have to be so tall? Iron Man and Batman are both borderline 5-foot-8 and they can still kick ass...maybe I'm just bitter). Hugo Weaving’s alright as Red Skull but the villain himself has absolutely no motivation besides being a dick and never really feels like a threat, even when the magical MacGuffin Cube that shoots lighting or some bullshit comes into his possession. I could talk about the female love interest, but seriously, I might as well just copy and paste the same lines about her from every other comic book movie review I’ve ever done and it would pretty much be the exact same description.
Captain America is far from bad but I can’t in all good consciousness call it good. It’d be like calling a football team “good” for having a winning season even though they scheduled the Detroit Lions for all 16 games. It takes no chances and no risks and plays out so predictably that it might as well have been renamed Generic Superhero Movie #548B.
It’s not bad. It’s average. Run of the mill. And the only reason I don’t consider it “bad” is because the bar for comic book movies is set so fucking low that mole people would trip over it. The stench of Avengerslingers annoyingly over the proceedings, particularly in the last ten minutes, and keeps it from being its own film in its own right. It’s just another Avengers prequel, just another generic origin story that Marvel pushed out over a weekend to promote its version of Watchmen. You can spend money to go see it if you want, or you could just watch any other Marvel comic book movie in your DVD collection and just picture the hero wearing a New England Patriots jersey.