Solid superhero

Rating: 8/10 (27 May 2014)

It seems that a modern day superhero movie has to follow certain rules: the hero/s must be flawed, the villain must maintain a parallel existence until the final confrontation and, most recently, Samuel L Jackson must pop up to make a cameo that links the whole film to a greater body of work.
Captain America follows these trends quite closely, leaving not an awful lot of shocks and surprises. Now, this may seem like a bad thing, but, actually, the film is pretty good fun to watch. The characters are all likable, Hugo Weaving and Tommy Lee Jones add a certain heavyweight star-power to the proceeding. Perhaps the only drawback is that the film seems to take quite some time for Captain America to actually become 'proper' Captain America, but then that leads me on to the movie's real purpose.
Like Hulk. Like Thor and like the Iron Man movies, Captain America is largely one giant prequel for the upcoming Avengers movie. If The Avengers wasn't being made, the whole of Captain America's story could probably have been shown as a flashback. It felt like - and this is a criticism of all the recent Marvel movies - they all seem to be holding their true potential back, presumably so as not to burn themselves out and leave nothing for the Avengers movie.
However, looking at Captain America as a stand alone movie, it was pretty good. I don't know much about the origins of the character (in other words I've never read one of his comic books), but I liked the way the story was linked to real historical events.
Good to see that computer-generated effects wasn't overly used (I'm still scarred by Transformers 3), so, if you fancy a decent romp, give the Capt a try.
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