Captain America – Same old song and Dance

Rating: 6/10 (10 March 2012)

Captain America is a comic book movie the presents itself like a comic book movie. That is not necessarily a bad thing but it can grow old. The director Joe Johnson directed another comic book movie that was so much better. The Rocketeer, also directed by Joe Johnson, is movie that draws inspiration from comic books without making the mistake of becoming a comic book movie.
Here it is simple the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad. Though the bad guys start out as a special division they are still just Nazis but you would never know that looking at them. Absent are all the swastikas and normal Nazi uniforms. Sure everything looks Nazi-ish and you know it is WWII so there is no doubt they are Nazis ,they even succeed in mentioning something about Hitler, but it never manages to feel real or scary unlike Joe Johnsons other movie the Rocketeer which used Nazi symbols, uniforms and weapons prominently. Anchored with that reality the Rocketeer feel so much more "real" even though both are movies that derived from comic books. From there it only gets more unreal. The weapons the bad guys carry are science fiction laser weapons. Very hard to pull off in a WWII war movie and here it just feels like a Saturday morning cartoon. Yes they bad guys had advanced technology but why go that route? With such an unreal movie why not try and keep it as real as possible.
On a side note I have to mention something I thought was really dumb. One of the soldiers fighting with Captain America wears a "bowler hat'. Nothing is wrong with that. But when he puts his sergeant chevron on it and uses it as part of his official uniform that is the kind of stuff that keeps it a comic book movie. Sure that is a little thing and maybe it is nitpicking but it doesn't help any with trying to give this movie any reality cred. If it is going to be a comic book movie why not embrace it and have The Captain throw out some cheesy over the top pro-American one-liners? He is Captain America. It brings to mind the scene from the 80's G.I Joe cartoon movie when Sgt. Slaughter is punching a bad guy and with the last punch says "And this is for the U.S of A!!" Bam! The guy gets punched. Cheesy yes but that is the point. They are both super American patriots.
I can't end this without talking about his uniform. Although I am a comic book fan and do read many of them I must confess I know very little about The Captain. In my opinion his uniform was close enough to what is in the comics that I like it. I guess they could have done worse with this movie and in all actuality I didn't hate it but it is hard for me think of it as anything other they just another comic book movie.