RADICAL ROCK’S REVIEW – CAPTAIN AMERICA

RADICAL ROCK’S REVIEW – CAPTAIN AMERICA

You’ll believe a man can shrink
Or
The Red and the White and the Blue come through

This is a WWII movie through and through. Training camp, big battles, POWs, prison breaks, incursions, secret codes, secret bases, secret identities and USO girls abound. Though this is an origin story, we do have a war going on in the background for the first half hour or so. The movie keeps us entertained while we wait for him to bulk up. Before the bulkening, we get some amazing CGI that makes Chris Evans in the title role look scrawny and just plain small. What’s most incredible about that is they don’t digitally put his head on someone else’s body like Benjamin Button. That’s actually Evans performing the whole time, and they digitally shrunk him here and there to give us the “sand kicked in his face” before look.

I will happily admit to trepidation at the idea of Chris Evans taking on this iconic role. Particularly after watching his first iconic super-hero role as the Human Torch in the two Fantastic Four movies last decade. He played Johnny Storm much like Ryan Reynolds. Flash forward to this year, and look at what Reynolds did to Green Lantern. Yeah, my trepidation was well founded. But, I’m happy to admit said trepidation mainly because I had nothing to worry about. Evans did a fine job portraying our star-spangled hero. He gave Steve Rogers such pathos and courage. The heart of the story becomes more about the character of the character than his superhuman abilities. He had us empathizing, understanding, and admiring this true hero.

Back to the Human Torch, that leads us to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it coolest cameo of the movie. At the World’s Fair expo in good old Flushing, Queens, they pan through the room, briefly showing Dr. Phineas Horton’s creation. Marvel Comic’s FIRST super-hero, the Synthetic Man known as the original Human Torch! I don’t consider this much of a spoiler because a: if you’re a big enough geek (like me) to notice the cameo, you’ve seen this movie already, 2: If you’ve seen the flick and didn’t notice, I’m being kind enough to point it out to you and d: if you don’t have a certain amount of geek in you, right now you’re thinking, “Whoop-de-shit. Get back to the review already, Jagoff!” and could care less.

Evans is aided by some fantastic performances, especially Stanley Tucci as his mentor/father figure, and Tommy Lee Jones in the same gruff boss/comedy relief role as J.K. Simmons did as J Jonah Jameson in the Spiderman trilogy. (New Spiderman trailer on a huge screen in 3D? Niceness!) Jones has THE best lines in the movie, in the same vein as “I don’t care!” from The Fugitive. Then we have Hugo Weaving who has gone from a drag queen in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert to the go-to guy for mega-property blockbusters. THE villain from The Matrix and Transformers, not to mention papa elf from LOTR, The masked lead from V for Vendetta and Noah from Happy Feet (heh) is now one of the top five comic book villains of all time. And, man did they make him look perfect. No simply scarred up face like they did in the first Captain America movie from 1990. They CGI’ed him into the Red Skull, emphasis on SKULL. With that voice backing up the visual, we got one ominous evil nazi. Rounding out the cast were fine performances from Toby Jones as Arnim Zola (no robot body… yet), Dominic Cooper as Tony’s daddy Howard Stark, a bunch of guys as the Howling Commandos and Sebastian Stan as “when is he gonna die” Bucky Barnes. Oh yeah, and Hayley Atwell is thrown in as Peggy Carter so we had a buffer for this sausage fest.

Yeah. I said that.

They set up next year’s Avengers without this being a “prequel”. Just as Marvel has done with the other Avengers movies, this is first and foremost its own entity. Little snippets are there to lead to the Avengers, but take nothing away from the narrative of the good Captain’s story. And, as in the other movies, the main link to Avengers is kept for the last scene and the scene after the credits.

One thing that was underwhelming was I felt the 3D was totally unnecessary for this movie. There are no glorious vistas of Asgard here. Seeing Cap’s shield fly by in 3D was just not worth the extra five bones the movie theater charged me. They captured New York and Europe of the 1940s just fine. 3D added nothing.

This is simply a fantastic adventure war movie, with a hero you root for from the beginning and a villain (Nazis are easy) you really despise.


Prime’s Bottom Line – I am SO ready for the Avengers! (sans Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman)