America's Super Soldier

Rating: Null/10 (7 August 2011)

Chris Evans who seems to be specializing in super heroes after just doing a couple of Fantastic Four movies as Johnny Storm the human torch, is now debuting as Captain America: The First Avenger. This will be like the Harry Potter series, the first of many projected films about Marvel Comics super hero coming out of World War II when choices seemed a lot simpler then.
Notice the somewhat out of focus cinematography where Evans is introduced as 98 pound weakling Steve Rogers from Brooklyn who try as he might can't get taken by any of the Armed Services after Pearl Harbor. Something in the young man's earnestness and decency appeals to scientist refugee from Hitler Stanley Tucci and he takes him for a secret program the government has in developing enhanced super soldiers. Looking at it today it sounds like they're giving steroids out.
Evans is to be the first of many, but he stays just a prototype after Tucci is killed by Nazi spies. Over in the Reich a Reinhardt Heydrich type character is also conducting experiments along the same line with a little less care. His dosage turns him into a really ugly crimson character now called Red Skull who is busy developing a cult of personality around himself and some enhanced Nazi soldiers who are already well indoctrinated into master race type theories. Red Skull is played with appropriate menace by Hugo Weaving.
Captain America is an enhanced human being, but by no means endowed with any super powers. He's as vulnerable as Batman in the right circumstances and Evans in his characterization leaves no doubt about that.
Curiously enough back in World War II Captain America did come to the screen as a movie serial with Dick Purcell as the Captain. The catering budget for this film probably was around the same amount it took to create that whole serial.
As the first of many projected Captain America films, The First Avenger is good Saturday matinée entertainment of the old fashioned kind.