Frequent PJM contributor Christian Toto reviews Captain America: The First Avenger at his blog:
“Captain America’s” first half bubbles with 1940s nostalgia and all the Uncle Sam decency Evans can muster. His Steve Rogers couldn’t outbox his own shadow, but there’s not a lick of quit in him. He’s both heroic and hapless, a droll combination.
He also gets a feisty romantic foil in Hayley Atwell, a va-va-voom British agent overseeing Steve’s transformation. Tommy Lee Jones appears every few scenes to bark out lines straight out of his craggy DNA, and it’s just the kind of abrasive tone needed to lend this old-fashioned romp some texture.
So why isn’t Cap’s arch nemesis the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) the lip-smacking villain we expected?
Weaving, who made the mysterious man behind the mask in “V for Vendetta” into a character of substance, can’t do much with his flaming red noggin. He kills a random member of his troupe at one point, a tired technique to show us how bad the baddie is in a given film. But there’s nothing special about him. He’s super strong but prefers not to confront Captain America directly, and his master scheme to attack the U.S. mainland feels like a plot sketch stolen from a Bond movie.
Of course, there’s an even more demonic WWII-era villain that the filmmakers could used; Kyle Smith debates why they didn’t at his own Website.
When I was a kid, Marvel Comics was where it was at (DC was old, stuffy, and hopelessly camp)…but even so, I never got into Captain America. I liked Spider-Man, Iron Man, the X-Men, etc – but Captain America seemed like a hokey throwback who would fit in at DC better than he did at Marvel. So I’m not terribly tempted to see this movie.
Maybe I’ll check it out next year when it’s streaming on Netflix.
I owned every Captain America story in the modern Marvel era there was from Avengers #4 to deep into Cap and the Falcon. For me was Cap was at his best when Jack Kirby drew him but I also liked the very short stints Gil Kane did on a Red Skull sequence and also Jim Steranko.
I disagree with the above poster. Only Stan Lee and Marvel could’ve given gravitas to a guy in such a goofy costume and they did. Tortured by memories, Rogers always did the right thing and had to do it with skill and no powers. Some of his fights done by Lee/Kirby are really memorable. I echo the sentiment that a fight against Hitler AND the Red Skull would’ve been good. The series of stories that wove in and out of the Avengers and Nick Fury and the Super-Adaptoid and A.I.M.; man, that was some fun stuff.
The movie is a rouser. We saw it yesterday and loved it. As a plus, it also contains a great many laugh-out-loud moments.
We need movies such as this — and not to resuscitate the ailing “pictorial literature” industry.