Aye, aye, Cap'n

Rating: 6/10 (2 May 2012)

Well, my wife was out for the night so I thought I'd indulge myself with a big blockbuster super-hero flick. I'm much more of a DC than a Marvel fan, so Steve Rogers and his red white and blue alter-ego mean little to me, but that may have helped me enjoy the movie more, not trying to reference every character and scene back to the comic. As a movie, despite its being primarily set in World War II, it lacks the darkness and psychological depth of say Christopher Nolan's Batman and to be fair doesn't once threaten to go there. Thus most of the characters are very 2-dimensional, either very heroic or very evil and as you'd expect, a good portion of the running-time is given over to action sequences and while there's a smattering of humour throughout, I could have stood some more. The early, scene-setting section works the best I think, particularly the remarkable shrinking technology which reduces Chris Evans to a mere pipsqueak. Can it be a coincidence that another 98lb weakling who morphed into a fearless muscle-man, Charles Atlas, shared our hero's initials? To be fair, that's about as much depth, if that's the right word, as you get here. However the story zips along like a good comic should and the acting's okay too. Tommy Lee- Jones gets an easy pay-day as a sub-Patton crusty C.O. while Hayley Atwell does a nice all-action English rose. The Red Skull makes for a good villain, with Hugo Weaving hamming up it up convincingly as the other mad Nazi out to rule the world. I did find the tying-in of the film to the upcoming Avengers movie as blatant as Stan Lee's pointless cameo, but all-told this was an enjoyable if not exactly marvellous comic-strip outing, the better for its war-time setting.