Middle of the road

Rating: 4/10 (23 March 2014)

Before the Marvel film "The Avengers" came out in 2012, there had been buildup for the movie for the past several years. In Marvel's numerous cinematic releases during that time, the films were used to introduce the heroes who would be in "The Avengers" and to give the audience little glimpses and Easter eggs of what was coming. "Captain America: The First Avenger" was the forth Marvel movie, the third one used to set up a character, since the release of "Iron Man" in 2008 to get people ready for the film that everything was building up to.
This may sound strange, but this is the first superhero movie I've ever seen where I did not really know what to think of it. "Captain America" The First Avenger" was not a great superhero movie like "X2", but it was not terrible like "The Amazing Spider-Man". It rested somewhere in the middle of the two films. For every positive, there was a negative and so on and so on. This film is the perfect example of a movie that is in the middle of the road.
The Red Skull (Hugo Weaving) discovers the Tesseract around the same time that America has entered into World War II and Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a skinny weakling is rejected from the military due to being deemed unfit. Steve is given a chance to be in the military because of a secret project overseen by Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci). There, he meets Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), Colonel Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones), and the father of Tony Stark, Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper). After Steve is turned into Captain America, he is used mainly to boost morale, going from location to location giving shows for the troops. Cap learns that his friend James "Bucky" Barnes (Sebastian Stan) and a number of other soldiers went missing in action, Cap goes to rescue all of them, proving his worthy to the military as a soldier.
As I said earlier, for every pro that the movie has there is an equal con. Chris Evan's Captain America is a fun character to watch and get invested in, while Hugo Weaving's Red Skull is a comical, generic villain with nothing interesting to his character. Some of the characters are very bland and forgettable like Atwell's Peggy Carter, or have no character but are only interesting because of their actor or actress such as Jones' Colonel Phillips, while others like Stan's Bucky and Tucci's Erskine are interesting and fun to watch and you get invested in them. The effects, editing, and story both have equal amounts of pros and cons to them.
When it all comes down to it, the movie is not terrible, just unmemorable and kind of bland. It has some good elements to it, some interesting characters, and some good effects, but for each of these positives is an equal negative.