Captain America
Following in the footsteps in Spiderman, Iron Man and the X Men, Captain America is the latest Marvel Comics character to hit the big screen. Set during the Second World War, the film follows puny Steve Rogers, considered too weak and small to join the army until an experimental serum turns him into Buffy the Nazi Slayer. With his trusty shield and form-fitting costume, the newly anointed Captain America is first used merely as a propaganda tool, before eventually being dispatched to bring down an SS officer who has also taken a hefty dose of the super serum and set up a Teutonic cult. Captain America has already knocked the final Harry Potter from the top spot at the US box office; can the film win over the critics?
- A film of two halves. Writing in The Independent, Anthony Quinn felt the film lost its way after a promising beginning: “Too bad, then, that the film’s latter stages fall back so unthinkingly on the platitudes of the action adventure movie… Explosions, firefights and chases proceed to eat up the screentime, yet curiously make that time go much slower – surely the opposite of their intention.” Over at The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw agreed, praising the beginning as “smart and inventive”, before complaining that when the real action kicks in, “some of the movie’s steroidal muscle tone turns to fat”. However, Bradshaw was impressed by the very final scene: “Here is where the movie becomes, refreshingly, less wholesome than all that had gone before.”
- Character-driven? In The Evening Standard, David Sexton was impressed by what he saw as the refusal to sacrifice character for plot: “Evans is unprecedentedly touching and engaging for a superhero – and the rest of the cast help this adventure seem something close to character-driven instead of just being a bundle of stunts.” Sexton singled out Tommy Lee Jones, playing a tough colonel, and Hugo Weaving as the film’s super villain for particular praise. By contrast, Sukhdev Sandhu in The Telegraph felt the lead performance left him cold: “Less conflicted than many modern-day action heroes, he’s neither interesting nor someone to root for.”
- 3D. In Little White Lies, Lewis Bazley questioned the movie’s use of 3D: “It’s by no means perfect, with needless 3D muddying the by-the-numbers third-act action and jeopardising what’s supposed to be a fist-pumping comeback scene, while the villainous Red Skull is risible to look at.” Perhaps Larushka Ivan-Zadeh was watching a different film: “What with director Joe Johnston being an Oscar-winning special-effects veteran, it’s that rare phenomenon; a movie actually enhanced by 3D,” she wrote in Metro.
- Seen it all before. Writing in Time, Richard Corliss felt the movie was all too familiar: “The only problem is that we’ve been there — been nearly everywhere Captain America goes — in countless previous movies.” Corliss argued that the makers of Captain America have borrowed from a range of older films, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, that have already been plundered by recent action flicks.
