Good movie about a good man

Rating: 7/10 (23 April 2016)

I could not have been less interested in a film about Captain America before seeing this, which I did only because I remain interested in Marvel's project of building its own cinematic universe and did not want to skip film #5. As it turned out, this is the first in the MCU seamlessly to tie the disparate elements together and to provide some context for ongoing and upcoming tensions and conflicts. It also delivers a rollicking good time and is easily the best film in the MCU since "Iron Man."
As embodied (perfectly, including his actual body) by Chris Evans, Steve Rogers/Cap is neither the jingoistic super-soldier nor the ironic refutation of one that he might have been; he is, as Stanley Tucci's Dr. Erskine puts it, simply a good man. The story and screenplay do a great job of emphasizing the core values of what we, in the 21st Century, would want in an All-American hero (including, alas, the fact that he is still white, which might change someday) while also exploring the more cynical or less appealing uses to which others would put that hero. Director Joe Johnston's visual style deliberately recalls wartime propaganda films from both sides of the WWII, including the masterpieces of Leni Riefenstahl. Cap's chaste, tragic romance with Bucky ... um, Peggy Carter (beautifully played by not-so-secret weapon Haley Atwell) adds the right amount of pathos and reinforces the period sensibilities without overwhelming or distracting from the main story. If there's a weakness here, it's one common to Marvel films: the villain, Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), is too cartoonishly evil to take seriously as a threat. Weaving has a grand old time playing up Red Skull's megalomania, but as written the character lacks the cunning and cleverness that made Tom Hiddleston's Loki so formidable in "Thor," the only film in the MCU so far to have a worthy villain. It might have been more interesting to spend more time with Hydra -- the film only hints at the threat Hydra poses to the established world order. Of course, there will be time for that in future movies and TV shows, but if these are the origin stories of both an important hero and a fiendish threat, the film ultimately delivers the first in spades and doesn't quite manage the second as effectively as it could have.