Flick Flak: Captain America
Captain America: The First Avenger
Director: Joe Johnston
With: Chris Evans, Hugo Weaving, Hayley Atwell
12A, 124mins
Captain America: The First Avenger, the last film in the Marvel pantheon before The Avengers lands next summer, is a little disappointing after the quality of recent entries from Marvel, but is still an entertaining-if-silly action film.
The release of Thor only a few months previous to Captain America is the latter film's most damaging aspect; Thor, despite being based on far sillier source material, was made with such quality that we found ourselves caring about the brotherly rivalry of the aforementioned Asgardian god and Loki. For the duration of Captain America I found myself entertained, but not caring about the characters or their relationships.
This certainly isn't the fault of the acting, because this is excellent. Chris Evans is very good as Steve Rogers, the weedy American who doesn't like bullies, and volunteers for the army during World War 2 so often that he is inducted into the super soldier programme. Evans is sincere and likeable while avoiding being too 'goody-goody', and the same can be said for the film in general. Hugo Weaving, as the villainous Red Skull, is serviceable but does not recapture such menacing performances as Agent Smith or even V, but support from the likes of Stanley Tucci and Tommy Lee Jones brings welcome humour, and these two generally steal their scenes.
While Weaving is decent enough, the villains in general are not a strong point of this film. Hydra are basically your standard, Bond-style faceless evil organisation, with plenty of goons carrying out the extremely vague plans of Herr Schmidt. Their hilariously camp salutes, and the Red Skull's poorly-conceived and explained plans, make for an aimless group of bad guys. Again this suffers compared to Thor, a film whose villain was really interesting: Loki is entirely accessible, with motives we could understand and a scheme that was nefarious but with which we could sympathise.
As an origins story Captain America is actually pretty good. Steve Roger's journey from weakling, to super-strong experiment, to propaganda tool and eventual hero is interesting and well handled. The action scenes are sometimes thrilling (Cap's shield fighting is a highlight) but often are a bit predictable, and, though I don't base a film on looks, the special effects often looked jarringly dodgy to me.
Overall then this film seemed like a box-ticking effort, designed to introduce Captain America to audiences before he returns with his superhero crew next year. The actual introduction of the character is great, but the film falls down a bit when they put forward an unthreatening villain with unthreatening plans. Having said that, if this film had come out before Thor I might have reviewed it more positively.
As a last word, don't forget to stay until after the credits for the obligatory Avengers teaser... this time we get an actual, if fleeting, trailer for The Avengers itself.
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