Captain America: The First Avenger
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As muscular, stiff, shiny, and dull as its star, Joe Johnston's high-gloss take on the last building block of Marvel's 2012 tentpole Avengers film is in the end little more than a dutiful origin story for a superhero who has frankly long been something of a back-bencher. Unlike some comic-book franchises, however (did Spawn, for instance, ever have a chance of being anything but terrible?), this one had promise. It's the story of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a sickly shrimp of a kid from Brooklyn who's repeatedly declared unfit for military service at the start of World War II. By dint of his scrappiness and plucky good-heartedness, Rogers is accepted into a top-secret program where he's injected with a serum that turns him into a buffed figure of herculean might. Watch out, Nazis!
First conceived in 1941 as a kind of more muscular embodiment of American awesomeness than Uncle Sam, Captain America walloped Herr Hitler in the jaw on the cover of his first issue (published, interestingly, months before the United States even entered the war). In one of this film's few enjoyably quirky moments, we see this scene repeated as a joke. Having just undergone his transformation, Rogers is sent not to the front lines but on a tour with some showgirls to wave the flag and razzle-dazzle audiences to raise war-bonds -- at the climax of the act, he knocks out an actor playing Hitler in the worst stage-punch of all time. Taking his tour to the troops, Rogers finds that what worked for civilians in Boston doesn't play for muddied GIs slogging through a bloody campaign in Italy -- "Nice boots!" They shout, and "Bring back the girls!"
The real Hitler doesn't make an appearance in this film, which seems curiously indifferent to the realities of the war its plot supposedly focuses on. Rogers's nemesis is Nazi scientist Johann Schmidt (a seethingly vile Hugo Weaving, who it's surprising to see took this long to play a hissing Nazi villain), who's questing for some buried magical implement left by the Nordic gods as a way of achieving world dominance. The shiny blue cube that Schmidt finds not only serves as a clumsy bridge to the mythology of the summer's earlier pre-Avengers film, the considerably more light-hearted and enjoyable Thor, but also provides a chance for a distracting Raiders of the Lost Ark quip.
Liberating himself from the grind of the war-bond drive, Rogers suits up with his indestructible, boomerang-like shield, courtesy of Iron Man's Q-like predecessor Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), and sets about tearing down Schmidt's system of secret factories. It's even more patently ridiculous than it sounds, with Schmidt somehow able to build, under the nose of both Hitler and the Allies, massive fortified complexes that would have made Cobra Commander green with envy.
None of that would matter, of course, if Johnston or screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely had been able to inject the film with any real sense of life or spontaneity. Instead, it starts strong by building up an initially credible hero and then casts it all away by going straight to the cliché handbook. Evans is missing in action as the star, jutting his jaw at appropriate times, but never bringing any real spark to his creation. Tommy Lee Jones and Stanley Tucci do credible work in criminally underwritten supporting roles on the Allied side, as does Toby Jones as Schmidt's sniveling sidekick -- one has to wonder what a better film it might have been had the smaller Jones used his Truman Capote voice throughout. Now that would have been a villain for the ages
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First conceived in 1941 as a kind of more muscular embodiment of American awesomeness than Uncle Sam, Captain America walloped Herr Hitler in the jaw on the cover of his first issue (published, interestingly, months before the United States even entered the war). In one of this film's few enjoyably quirky moments, we see this scene repeated as a joke. Having just undergone his transformation, Rogers is sent not to the front lines but on a tour with some showgirls to wave the flag and razzle-dazzle audiences to raise war-bonds -- at the climax of the act, he knocks out an actor playing Hitler in the worst stage-punch of all time. Taking his tour to the troops, Rogers finds that what worked for civilians in Boston doesn't play for muddied GIs slogging through a bloody campaign in Italy -- "Nice boots!" They shout, and "Bring back the girls!"
The real Hitler doesn't make an appearance in this film, which seems curiously indifferent to the realities of the war its plot supposedly focuses on. Rogers's nemesis is Nazi scientist Johann Schmidt (a seethingly vile Hugo Weaving, who it's surprising to see took this long to play a hissing Nazi villain), who's questing for some buried magical implement left by the Nordic gods as a way of achieving world dominance. The shiny blue cube that Schmidt finds not only serves as a clumsy bridge to the mythology of the summer's earlier pre-Avengers film, the considerably more light-hearted and enjoyable Thor, but also provides a chance for a distracting Raiders of the Lost Ark quip.
Liberating himself from the grind of the war-bond drive, Rogers suits up with his indestructible, boomerang-like shield, courtesy of Iron Man's Q-like predecessor Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), and sets about tearing down Schmidt's system of secret factories. It's even more patently ridiculous than it sounds, with Schmidt somehow able to build, under the nose of both Hitler and the Allies, massive fortified complexes that would have made Cobra Commander green with envy.
None of that would matter, of course, if Johnston or screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely had been able to inject the film with any real sense of life or spontaneity. Instead, it starts strong by building up an initially credible hero and then casts it all away by going straight to the cliché handbook. Evans is missing in action as the star, jutting his jaw at appropriate times, but never bringing any real spark to his creation. Tommy Lee Jones and Stanley Tucci do credible work in criminally underwritten supporting roles on the Allied side, as does Toby Jones as Schmidt's sniveling sidekick -- one has to wonder what a better film it might have been had the smaller Jones used his Truman Capote voice throughout. Now that would have been a villain for the ages
.
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