Superhero movie ruined by unimaginative development and infantile writing

Rating: 3/10 (7 August 2011)

Superhero movies could be, depending on who writes and directs them, dark (Burton's Batman), cerebral (Snyder's Watchmen), tragic (Nolan's Batman), cleverly funny (Favreau's Ironman) or fashionably pop (Raimi's Spiderman). Unfortunately, some can be utterly stupid, like Schumacher's Batman & Robin and, now, Captain America.
I found so many flaws with this movie that it is difficult to begin the list. First, the retro-style, which could have potentially been a plus, was simply tasteless and idiotic. The good care spent on style, clothing, and hairdos of the 40s was out-weighted by the bad taste in designing weapons that lacked any imagination, and looked like colorful glow sticks at best.
The jingoist atmosphere of the beginning was downright irritating, with the skinny main character trying to enroll in the Army and being rejected (c'mon, like the army never enlisted skinny guys as spies, clerks, radio operators, mechanics, or simple cannon meat) only to be picked up by a team of scientists for an experiment to create super soldiers.
To be fair, Chris Evans is not that bad as an actor. although he had more sparks in Fantastic Four and Scott Pilgrim. But Markus and McFeely must have thought that writing a superhero movies frees writers from any duty to put together a decent plot. They did not invest any effort in creating plausible scenarios (Rogers/Captain America is in Italy exactly where his best friend's division is captured, which is also exactly where the colonel who selected him for the experiment is located, which is exactly where the token girl/scientist was displaced). They also did not spend time introducing characters (The bad guy, aka Red Skull, has a risible back-story, besides a risible and overly cartoonist make-up). They even miss potential opportunities: The McGuffin of the movie is some sort of cubic lava-lamp that the Nazis are after. The lava-lamp has some kind of unexplained occult nature; is retrieved from a church in Norway (wtf???) and is finally used to create... death rays! Yes, death rays, a plot device that (a) was shunned upon in B-movies even in the 50s, and (b) discards the only cool subplot, i.e. the Nazis dabbling in the occult, which was not lost, for example, in Hellboy.
As for the adventures of Captain America, let's drop a veil of pity. He is supposedly the strongest/faster super-soldier, but his great adventures basically consist in ziplining through the Alps and opening prisons cells after stealing the keys. That's really all. Not a single combat scene that goes beyond what you could see in the Beastmaster in the 80s. Are the authors maybe going for a sane, raw, realistic take on superheros? Nay---when needed, and even when not needed at all, Captain America shows off his great weapon, which is basically a giant Frisbee that defies gravity and conveniently resists to the Nazi death rays.
In the meantime, director Joe Johnston (ok, that's the guy from Jumanji and Jurassic Park III, but even he could do better) is very careful in avoiding putting the camera in any position that might give some edge and atmosphere to any shot. In fact, the movie was so cinematographically dull I was surprised they just did not shoot everything with 3 cameras, like I Love Lucy. I guess that the most original shots were contributed by the CGI guys.
Essentially, what comes through is an expensive toy-movie with grandiose and expensive visual effects, firefighter's orchestra music, and lots of advertisement spent to promote a ridiculous man-in-tights wielding a pied metal saucer, and fighting villains whose makeup and depth make Schwarzenegger's Mr. Freeze look like Shakespearian characters.
I want my money back. The only way the movie could have redeemed itself is if Captain America died in the damn Nazi flying plane. Unfortunately (sorry to ruin the surprise) it doesn't happen.