The central conceit of Captain America: The First Avenger , Joe Johnston's contribution to this summer's glut of superhero sagas, could have been dreamed up by a fitness chain from the future — the injection of a serum and a few minutes are all it takes for a scrawny kid to transform into a burly hunk whose metabolism is four times higher than average. Today, this newly hatched Adonis would be instantly recruited by the makers of underwear ads. But in the 1940s, the U.S. army, which commissioned this experiment, does not know what to do with Steve Rogers (Chris Evans).
He ends up a poster boy for the war effort, performing on stage as Captain America, with a fairly ridiculous costume and with chirpy chorus girls in the background. This sense of amiable purposelessness settles like a soft blanket over the first half of the film, which cannot quite decide what to do with Rogers either. We keep waiting for a child to cry out from a burning building or a meteor to speed towards earth with the grim promise of annihilation to see what Captain America can do.
As it turns out, it isn't anything that an alert action star couldn't toss off in a first take. The Nazi villain Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving, playing an entirely unexpected kind of redhead) says it best when he calls his nemesis a “simpleton with a shield.” There just isn't all that much that's interesting about Captain America. He's the anti-Batman (to invoke another superhero not exactly endowed with godlike superpowers), a creature of broad daylight, naïve and polite and largely absent of angst or doubts or even signs of an inner life.
Had Norman Rockwell conceived a crime fighter, he'd be like Steve — he's Captain Americana. During a chase, when he crashes through the window of a store and knocks over a mannequin, he pauses to say “I'm sorry.” He is unstintingly patriotic, making multiple tries to enlist in the army and fight Nazi bullies (who, naturally, mirror the bullies who beat him up regularly in his neighbourhood; it's crime-fighting as catharsis). Even after he transforms into a muscle-bound looker, he is flummoxed by the motives of Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), who couldn't make her interest in him clearer. The film's challenge is to convert this earnestness into excitement, and that it never really does.
What we're left with is a functional piece of storytelling, with no adrenalin-rushing highs and no real lows — and it's beautifully mounted. It's also excessively reminiscent of a number of earlier films. If the Nazis and the near-religious artefact they're after recall the Indiana Jones adventures, the multilingual and multinational crew that Steve puts together for a mission is a staple of war films, and the climactic battle is straight out of Star Wars , right down to the legions of storm troopers and the domed bots on the surface of fighter aircraft, and even the villain, like Darth Vader, peels off one face to reveal another.
The film saves its best for last, where a twist ending sets up a sequel with a premise that's usually dealt with only in time-travel romances. Few superhero films ( Superman II, Batman Returns ) have concerned themselves with tormented togetherness, and that's just the sort of ripple that could enliven Captain America's placid surface, help him grow into a character with a few rough edges.
Saving the world is easy. Saving a relationship, though, takes more than mere superpowers.
Captain America: The First Avenger
Genre: Superhero fantasy
Director: Joe Johnston
Cast: Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Tommy Lee Jones
Storyline: A superhero is born; he saves the world (and you were expecting something else?)
Bottomline: Pleasant enough, but over familiar
