The Irish summertime was designed for a movie like Captain America: The First Avenger, a genuine summer blockbuster that wards off the chills and unseasonal rain with shamelessly fun entertainment and way-to-go-little-guy glee. This is popcorn escapism and big budget action that is pitched perfectly as the superhero movie that brings a bit of colour back into the comic strip fold.
The film, directed by Joe Johnston of Jumanji fame, is the final piece in the assembly line leading up towards next year’s Avengers, the superhero team-up epic single-handedly keeping the spandex industry afloat by combining Marvel’s cavalcade of comic-book champions into a dream-team of box-office smashing proportions. But the focus here in on this all-American hero, played by two-time superpower alumnus Chris Evans, whose Captain America is stars and stripes success, and feels so fresh for one simple reason: he’s rather old fashioned.
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| The prototype for Barbarella's Excessive Machine |
Old fashioned in every sense, given that the film takes place at the height of World War II, where we meet Steve Rogers, a weakly asthmatic who wants to fight for his country, not to kill the Hun and bag the honeys, but simply because he doesn’t like bullies. After failing yet again to enlist, Rogers is given the chance by a defected German scientist (Stanley Tucci) to partake in a secret military experiment to create a battalion of super soldiers using a serum, but covert agents and fate conspire to make Rogers the only one.
Now rebranded as Captain America, a propaganda tool rolled out across the states to sell war bonds, Rogers eventually proves his worth when entertaining the troops, facing off against Hydra, an occult-obsessed Nazi science division led by Hugo Weaving’s Johann Schmidt. While his name may as well have been plucked off the first page of Das große Buch von deutschen Namen back when Jack Kirby and Joe Simon first created the series in 1941, Weaving’s baddy here eats up the screen as his poisonous alter-ego, the fanatical Red Skull, who’s hell bent on global domination in the name of his own Reich.
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| That North Korean prison were taking their latest flash mob very seriously |
But Captain America is also old fashioned in that this is action packed and silly comic book fun, with hilarious throwaway one-liners zinging amid the brightly-coloured costumes, dolled-up showgirls and Marvel universe continuity tie-ins. It doesn’t take itself seriously, Rogers doesn’t brood, endlessly mediating on the nature of good and evil. It’s light. Don’t get me wrong, the film has a definite edge, and a fairly high body-count, with the latter half’s set pieces demonstrating what it’s like when a superhero goes to war, but Steve Rogers is a fun superhero, whose honest to Betsy spirit buoys up the film throughout, and whose fighting spirit is infectious.
Evans is perfect as Rogers, believable as both the pixelated poindexter and the beef-cake brute, and has a deftness of touch in terms of comedy and pathos that helps raise this flag-wearing hero above one-note patriotism. Tucci and Jones get the best jabs of Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely’s punchy script, but both bring great energy to dominate their scenes with relatively small parts. Hugo Weaving, having worked already with Johnston on The Wolfman, is magnetic as Schmidt, and his Werner Herzog-inspired accent is a triumph and villainous Vs and wayward Ws.
The only bum note, unfortunately, comes from Hayley Atwell’s British agent Peggy Carter. Atwell is a veritable vixen on the screen, a giant pair of voluptuous red lips and catty put-downs building up some pleasant, and very PG, sexual tension with our hero. But that is literally the only purpose she serves, being a doll-faced brawd for the male characters to ogle, and her role in the film (some sort of intelligence officer on work experience perhaps?) is never explained nor particularly justified.
Captain America: The First Avenger is a fun summer superhero film, which for me, in many ways conjures up the rip-roaring fun of early Indiana Jones and B-movies into a highly polished leap towards next year’s pay off. Avengers is still on track.
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Released Nationwide: July 29th
Runtime: 125 Mins
Certificate: PG
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