A Real American Hero

Another new movie that I'd originally had no interest in was Captain America: The First Avenger. I've soured pretty thoroughly on superhero movies over the past couple years, picking and choosing only a few to see. But here, as with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, there was a lot of good word of mouth to convince me to make an exception here.

One reason I maybe should have been considering it anyway was the director, Joe Johnston. Besides helming October Sky, a just-brushing-the-bottom-of-my-top-100 movie, he was also the director of The Rocketeer, one of the small handful of superhero movies I've actually liked. Captain America even seemed like it could have a bit of Rocketeer flavor, both being period stories set in decades past.

Well, it's no Rocketeer, but Captain America wasn't too shabby. The main problem for me with the movie was that it just took a long time to get rolling. Things are slow right from the first scene, a modern-day opening that exists only to set up next summer's film, The Avengers. If the film were truly stand-alone, this material not only would have been cut, it probably never would have been filmed.

Then there's the captain's origin story. I never could just relax and enjoy it because of two major problems, and so I found that to be slow-paced too. First, there's the story itself. Basically, a scrawny guy takes steroids and instantly becomes a superhero. It has to be a period piece, because for this day and age, that's a really screwed-up message.

But the bigger problem for me was the way the movie depicted our pre-steroidal hero, by using CG to Benjamin Button Chris Evans' head onto another body. I mentioned in reviewing Rise of the Planet of the Apes that the moments where my mind rejected the CG were few and far between. In Captain America, it never worked for me. Every scene of wimpy Steve Rogers just looked wrong. The head would move independently of the neck, or look obviously rotoscoped into the image, or be oddly blended into the shoulders. The look of the artifically sunken jawline seemed to change from one scene to the next. In my opinion, bad visual effects don't always get in the way of telling a story, but they certainly did here.

Fortunately, as with any superhero origin story, this section of the film only took up the first 30 minutes or so. And once "Captain America" arrived, the film finally found its footing. Chris Evans made a likeable hero. Hugo Weaving made a delicious villain. Tommy Lee Jones brought his patented brand of no-nonsense folksiness to a fun and funny supporting character. And Stanley Tucci made a full meal of his light snack of a role. All that is probably no surprise, but it was nice to see the performances all come together.

The story wasn't especially deep, but it certainly was exciting enough. It served well to hold several good action sequences of different types -- chases, assaults, aerial acrobatics.

In the end, I didn't like this as much as The Rocketeer. But for a superhero movie, I thought it a pretty good effort. I rate it a B-.