This film is the old-fashioned antidote to other hyper-modern summer super hero blockbusters like Green Lantern where even the super hero's super suit was CGI. How old fashioned is this movie? There's a character with a red skull for a face and they used makeup instead of CGI. Not old fashioned enough? There's an Alan Menken musical number with war bonds sales drives, pretty girls in costumes twirling flags, fireworks, confetti, signing, dancing, and Hitler-punching; plenty of Hitler-punching. Still not old fashioned enough? This film actually has a trailer at the end of its credits; previews of coming attractions used to be shown after films, trailing them as it were, which is how they got the nickname 'trailers'. Trivia!
We even get to see some characters watch a newsreel, and another character shout 'Show the cartoons already!' but sadly we don't get any ourselves. What we do get is a retro styled film, a completely earnest and un-self-conscious throwback, a two-fisted, gun-toting, shield-tossing good time that proudly signals its influences: one character remarks that Hitler is too preoccupied with 'digging up supernatural trinkets in the desert'. When movies try to ape Indiana Jones, it doesn't always work, but I would say this film falls somewhere above The Phantom but beneath The Shadow. Perhaps about the level of The Rocketeer, although I'm probably only making that connection because they have the same director Joe Johnston, who started his career working with George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg and continues to direct decent-to-good films in their general style.
Chris Evans recovers from being the smarm-incarnate Human Torch in the forgettable Fantastic Four franchise to play aw-shucks, gee-whiz, All-American nice guy Steve Rogers, whose only problem is his freakishly unhealthy goblin body, which is a much better effect than bobble-head youth-anized Jeff Bridges from Tron: Legacy or the terrifying child version of Mike Myers's character in the nightmare-inducing The Love Guru. Stuck in Brooklyn during WWII while his friends have all the fun fighting/struggling to survive in prison camps in Europe (not a joke, he finds his friends in cages), Rogers becomes our unlikely hero in a pretty unlikely way: somebody overhears him talking in a hallway about wanting to join the army real, real bad but being rejected because he's some sort of mythical tiny creature whose only power is being disease-ridden and weak.
The somebody that overhears him is a brilliant German scientist who fled the Third Reich for America and thankfully did so with his formula for Super Soldier Serum. Woo America! Dr. Erskine is played by Stanley Tucci who according to IMDB took the role because he wanted to use a German accent; he might not be the only person in this film who made that choice, but he is a great actor enjoying a recent career switch from playing villainous weasels to playing benevolent mentors. So the good doctor stuffs Rogers in a tube and turns on lots of machines and BLAMO! Rogers emerges looking like a Greek God, an Adonis carved from solid man-beef. Its weird that his legs get big too because they didn't make him take his pants off. So why did he have to take his shirt off then? This film is too family-friendly to suggest whether or not his dong got super-sized.
It probably did later because one of the military types that Rogers hangs out with is the distractingly busty Peggy Carter played by Haley Atwell as some sort of experiment to see if servicemens' heads will explode after prolonged exposure to a ruby-lipped, curvaceous British bombshell. Seriously, even by movie standards she is discombobulatingly beautiful, and at least a few scenes have characters staring at her chest instead of talking to her; the only feasible work she could do in the military is bomber art model. Its a shame that her burgeoning romance with Rogers is stymied by a rom-com style misunderstanding with him and 'the other woman' who seems to only appear long enough to derail the main characters love life and then vanish back whence she came, because otherwise Carter is a strong character, who rescues Rogers from danger once instead of vice-versa.
Rogers commanding officer, a Colonel, is Tommy Lee Jones, played by the well-cast Tommy Lee Jones. The good Colonel actually serves mostly as comic relief, muttering gravely about what a weak nancy-boy our hero is, both before and after he gets the serum that turns him giant. You can tell a great actor when they can make even eating food interesting and Jones passes the test here when he brings a steak dinner to a prisoner who refuses eat meat in what might be a reference to Hitler's vegetarianism, so Jones happily devours it himself.
Dominic Cooper appears as the young Howard Stark, father to the eventual Iron Man, previously seen briefly as John Slattery in Iron Man 2. But this is the 40's version of Howard Stark, and like his probable name-sake Howard Hughes (More Rocketeer) the 40's are his golden years. Dapper and mustachioed, Cooper steal scenes and gets big laughs with his devil-may-care scientist-playboy antics, whether its dimming half the lights in New York to help power the tube that turns Roberts buff or carelessly experimenting with pieces of potentially world-ending magic artifacts.
Of course Stan Lee appears in a cameo but if you need me to tell you that Stan Lee cameos in a Marvel Film then you probably don't give a shit about Marvel Films. The other members of the funny accent brigade are our villains: Klaus Schmidt, a man so evil the Nazis kicked him out, a man with a red skull that he reveals by somewhat inexplicably and inappropriately ripping off his face; Schmidt has the occasional accent of Werner Herzog but mostly he sounds like Hugo Weaving. His loyal toady is a fellow mad scientist, Dr. Zola. played by Toby Jones, with a thick, slimy accent, duplicitous bow-ties, and adorable frustration with his underlings.
Schmidt's organization is called Hydra, which cleverly leads to characters saying 'Hail Hydra' instead of 'Heil Hitler', part of an overall effort to not tie this film too closely to actual events in WWII. The film contains a few shocking deaths, like some Nazi bigwigs who find themselves on the wrong end of a newly invented portable death ray or some poor schmuck who gets vaporized by falling into a propeller. Late in the film, Rogers acquires a team of sidekicks, but since he already had a well-defined interesting sidekick, his best pal from back home Bucky, these characters seem obligatory inclusions at best, but at last they get one scene where they all go out drinking and singing.
Rogers becomes Captain America first as part of the advertising machine of wartime government. just like the 'I want YOU in the Army' posters or the Rosie the Riveter ads, the Captain is at first just a piece of wartime propaganda, selling war bonds by signing songs and punching Hitler on the stage at sales drives across the country. They even sell comic books about him in a nice meta touch, and his multiple incarnations over the course of the war allow for wacky alternate costumes and some actual character growth. Despite the obvious sci-fi elements present in the story, I was briefly distracted by such anachronisms as security cameras and integrated armed forces.
I thought the villain Red Skull was a little bit goofy, considering his accent comes and goes like his face. He doesn't want to rule the world, or win the war for Germany, or for himself, but to destroy anybody and everybody he can to show off how god-like his power is. Huh. At first I thought his plan and its use of a giant plane vaguely resembled a real life failed Nazi project, the Silbervogel but his plan is slightly less realistic than that one, and relies on a familiar magic cube that appeared in the post credits scene of Thor earlier this year.
It's a shame this movie couldn't have opened for the 4th of July weekend, because its a much better slice of Americana than whatever other, hyper-American film opened that weekend. This late July opening might be more appropriate after all though, because the film had the chance to dethrone Harry Potter VIII from the top of the American box office charts, in some sort of symbolic cinematic recreation of the American Revolution. Woo America wins again!
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