The Beating Heart of Marvel on Film

Rating: 9/10 (27 August 2015)

This now-beloved film combines the best elements of three wildly different action genres:
>) a superhero film;
>) a science fiction film; and
>) a World War II caper film.
It has a dream cast, and the production team does not whiff on the ball once the cast is dressed, assembled, and ready for the cameras to roll.
Chris Evans as Steve "Captain America" Rogers is equally good as the skinny kid who gets kicked around and overlooked and as the rippling miracle of expropriated-to-Manhattan Nazi war science who could MMA with Thor.
Hayley Atwell positively smolders, then ices, then smolders again as Agent Peggy Carter. The scene where Cap gets kissed by the saucy British HQ girl and Peggy goes 'laser eyes' on Cap is only one of several highlights Atwell supplies that humanize and balance the story.
Hugo Weaving is Red Skull. Red Skull! Easily the best villain ever pulled off by a superhero movie, patently the best Marvel Comics villain yet wrought in a Marvel Studios-made film. Weaving surpasses even his benchmark-setting work in The Matrix in this role.
The major supporting actors. Are you ready for this? Tommy Lee Jones, Stanley Tucci, and Toby Jones. So it's Oscar-Nom City in the second rank. Unreal. Unheard of. Unexpected.
But wait . . . there's more. Cap has a "Top Squad," the world's first superhero led strike team. And these actors are also of platinum- coated quality. The favorite is Neal McDonough as "Dumb Dumb Dugan," and Kenneth Choi as "Morita" and JJ Feild (who would soon win acclaim as Major John Andre in AMC's TURN: Washington's Spies TV show) also merit special mention.
And just when you thought 'A Top Squad? That's so easy, Cap wins, hands down.' Oh, no no no no no. Because HYDRA.
HYDRA. A group of intra-Nazi bad guys so bad, and with such advanced stuff (including (MCU nerd bait alert) a shrouded Infinity Stone, that they give Hitler the what-for (so the film alludes)). HYDRA don't care about no Top Squad.
And so the film creates collisions of vectored grim machine-gun-on- lasers action, and just enough of it to make a spectacle without making our eyes into a smoking junkyard.
Avengers, Shmavengers. This Captain America film is the beating heart of Marvel-on-Celluloid. A group of actors this good may never again appear together in a film this fun.