Carved from Granite. Out-acted by granite too.
dir: Joe Johnston
This makes up for enduring Green Lantern, but not by too much.
Captain America, despite being Captain America, was enjoyable enough. The film, especially the back end, doesn’t entirely satisfy, but it was so much more enjoyable an experience, and not as actively irritating as the aforementioned shitheap masquerading as just another franchise, that it could not help but look better.
I am aware that Captain America is a relatively ancient comic book property, dating back to the World War II era, famous for a cover that showed Cap punching out Hitler. The fact that this was drawn and published during the war makes it all the more important that, thankfully, Cap’s origin story (which most of the flick is) occurs during that vital time.
So, for me, the film is of two halves; halves not of duration, but of what ‘works’ and what doesn’t. The half that looks after the evolution of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) from scrawny Brooklyn kid so feeble he couldn’t even peel potatoes for the Navy, to super soldier, works. The bit that governs the detailing of a supervillain’s plans for world domination, that villain being Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), doesn’t work as well, for me. For my money the flick made something of a mistake by shielding us from some very obvious aspects required when you set something like this during the war. I’m ignoring the stuff they do to keep the rating down (making people disappear in puffs of smoke due to convenient made-up technology is more about getting a PG-13 rating than it is about looking ‘cool’, which it doesn’t).
I know that the Red Skull is the primary villain for Cap. I just think it was a bad idea for this flick, to give this particular villain such complete prominence. The main reason is this: um, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t there already a set of potential bad guys running around the world wrecking up the place and exterminating peoples willy-nilly?
What need does anyone have for a super form of that villain, when the Nazis were already despicable enough? Of course this is still a comic book property, but it just seemed off to me. The reasons Rogers wants to go through all this trouble is because of the other guys just like him who have gone over to Europe or the Pacific and die for their or someone else’s country. Presumably he wasn’t intending on fighting a made-up menace in the form of a post-Nazi villain who intends to rule the world through the deployment of magic-Asgardian technology.
Honestly, weren’t the threat of bullets and bayonets and bombs and flamethrowers and concentration camps enough? They needed a blue plasma laser-type technology to really make a difference? The Red Skull’s plan is pretty much as idiotic as anyone else’s supervillain plan, which basically never gets more complex than: dress henchmen in natty, dehumanising, robotic uniforms, and then threaten to blow shit up. The fact that he’s a red skulled megalomaniac shouldn’t deter or distract him from coming up with a workable plan. It’s only fair.
He doesn’t have one, though, and everything he does has one purpose and one purpose only: dispensing with Cap’s native timeline and origins so that he can appear in a string of flicks, sequels and ensembles like the upcoming Joss Whedon-directed The Avengers.
It’s a bit insulting, really, but then origin stories are often a bit insulting. When they’re good they’re great. Most of the pleasure I derived, and most of the flick’s running time in Iron Man is devoted almost solely to the ‘creation’ of Iron Man, both the suit and the motivation. What happened at movie’s end hardly mattered, which is why the pointless and empty brawling and ‘splosions and such didn’t bug me that much, despite how ridiculously contrived and formulaic it all was. All so unnecessary.
The fact that he was ‘created’ for propagandistic purposes works beautifully, for me. They spend all this money on R&D, steroids and super rays, only to intend to send him across America pimping for war bonds. Considering what’s happening in the States currently with the downgrading of their credit rating and the faltering of the US economy and bond markets, maybe what the government needs to do is resuscitate Steve Rogers and send him off to take on the credit ratings agencies like Standard and Poor's or Moody's. You know, the scumbags who gave all those bullshit Wall Street shysters clean bills of health as they were rogering global finance but a few scant years ago.
Gods know they’d deserve. Maybe that should be the premise of the Avengers flick. If it is, you owe me, Whedon.
They spend enough time on Steve as a scrawn that he earns the goodwill needed for us to still care about him (perhaps) as he’s tearing up the Nazis and then the pseudo-Nazis of the even more evil organisation Hydra. They take great pains to make us understand that it’s not the transformation that matters so much as who he was before. So they contrive to give us an abundance of sequences where he proves his essential decency.
The magical, kindly, not-long-for-this-world Dr Erskine (Stanley Tucci) mentor figure spells it out for us as completely as he can: whatever the serum’s going to do, it’s only going to enhance whatever qualities Steve already possesses. So if he’s a lovely chap, he’ll be even more lovely, kind, forthright and splendid. If he’s a prick, like the Red Skull, then he’ll be a super-powered awful prick.
Also, as a slight reversal of the trend seen quite recently, especially in those flicks that seem like a commentary on the fanboy comic-book psychology, Herr Doktor makes the point that, in his flawed estimation, people who’ve grown up without any power, and without a sense of entitlement, are better placed to appreciate the power that comes from gifted strength, and can be less likely to be corrupted by it. A cursory glance at the premise to flicks like Super and Kick-Ass, and the way many Americans seem to act once they get their first gun tells me that it’s very unlikely that this is the case.
I like those early scenes, a lot. As strange as seeing Chris Evan’s body on some tiny consumptive lad is, it’s perfectly fine for characterisation purposes. When he steps out of the machine, however, and looks like Arnie in his prime, well, there’s only so long you can stare at a man’s pectoral-muscular boobs without feeling slightly uncomfortable. Unless you’re a gay man, of course, in which case, go to town, young fresh fellows.
Once he dons the goofy promotional outfit, and then dons the other more serious outfit, and starts wielding the trademark shield, it’s a different story entirely. As in, literally a different story, and a somewhat less interesting one than that. The first action escapade, involving going behind enemy lines in order to save his pal Bucky, goes down well enough. In form and action, he’s what you’d expect from a burly soon-to-be-war-hero taking on the Hun. But, as the enemy transform from Nazis into, I don’t know, Nazi stormtroopers as redesigned if Leni Reifenstahl and the Fuhrer had seen George Lucas’s version of stormtroopers through the Star Wars flicks, and it becomes too science fiction-y, well, I pretty much lost interest.
Of course super soldier serums and tech to transform geeks into Greek gods is science fiction already, but all the other stuff about a blue techno threat even worse than the forces of fascism taking over the globe made me care that little much less, so damn their eyes for doing so. That being said, I very much liked the idea of Howard Stark being played and looking like Howard Hughes, as a billionaire engineer genius, which is not what happened in reality, but close enough. Dominic Cooper looks the part, at least. He’s decent enough, he has the moustache to boot, and while he doesn’t get to shag anyone in midflight, he did have the air of genius and rakishness about him.
Hayley Atwell plays the love interest, as Peggy something, and she’s decent enough as well. As a Brit agent who works for whatever mythical organisation precedes S.H.I.E.L.D, she gets to slap a few guys around for being sexist pigs back in the 1940s. And she has a few acerbic words for the hero, seeing as he’s a virgin. Of course, she comes to admire his boyishness and yippy energy, being the puppy dog that he is.
Tommy Lee Jones plays a role here in exactly the same crusty, grumbling manner in which he’s done virtually every role he’s ever portrayed since any flick you care to remember. Whether it’s Under Siege or Men In Black or goddamn anything, anything, he’s the same person. So if you liked him in everything else, you like him as he grunts and snuffles around the place like a superannuated retiree with nothing to do around the house but complain.
Chris Evans may have hidden depths as an actor, but this role doesn’t really require them. All he has to do is look noble and such, to look like a recruitment poster, and to look like the embodiment of what American men wished they looked like perhaps 70 years ago. I guess he succeeds on that front. The flick doesn’t give him that much to do in the back half but he does well enough in the action-y scenes, fling-flanging that awesome shield around. Maybe he’ll grow into the role as they make more of these Marvel marvels. It’s unlikely, though. He doesn’t make much sense to me outside of the WWII context, and the ending of this flick makes it pretty clear no other Cap stories will be set then, what with the thoroughly retarded manner in which they bring him into the present.
Whatever. This ‘golden’ age of cinematic superheroes seems like it’s never going to end. It almost makes me hunger for obscure 8-hour black and white silent Romanian art house flicks about potato farmers during the Middle Ages as an antidote.
6 times a day I see ads online and within inboxes promising to deliver similar results as this flick to certain parts of my anatomy out of 10
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“Why someone weak? Because a weak man knows the value of strength, the value of power” – they also know the value of getting back at all the people that stomped on them in the past – Captain America: The First Avenger
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