Captain America

Superhero origin stories have been all the rage at the multiplex this summer, with Marvel Comics alone accounting for two such films, Thor and X-Men: First Class, both of which happily surpassed critics’ expectations. Its latest, Captain America: The First Avenger – so named as to provide us a helpful link to the Avengers movie coming next year – arguably faces the trickiest task of all three, seeing as how Americans have not been in the most patriotic of moods in recent years. Could a flag-waving superhero really find purchase with a moviegoing audience that increasingly looks askance at such notions?

Surprisingly, yes. That Captain America succeeds – and resoundingly so – is partly due to the producers’ decision to set the film during World War II, a time where patriotism is a much easier sell. (And no viewer is too jaded to not enjoy seeing Nazis eviscerated en masse.) But proper credit must be given to director Joe Johnston, who has crafted a breathlessly entertaining popcorn movie that unambiguously embraces its hero’s old-fashioned sensibilities, and invites us to embrace them as well.

Chris Evans (The Losers, Fantastic Four) plays Steve Rogers, an earnest, oft-bullied ectomorph whose lone wish is to ship off to Europe and fight on the front lines. But a plethora of physical ailments have combined to render him hopelessly unfit to serve, however stiff his resolve. (To pull off the withered look of “Skinny Steve,” the filmmakers pulled off a nifty trick, grafting Evans’ head onto the body of another actor, Leander Neely.)

Rogers’ chance arrives in the guise of a government scientist, the German émigré Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci, as avuncular as a German-accented man can hope to be), who witnesses the young man’s idealistic ardor and recruits him to take part in secret military experiment. After proving his mettle in training, Rogers is delivered a dose of Super Serum, a PED that instantly makes him bigger, stronger, and faster than just about any other human alive.

Which is a good thing, because on the other side of the Atlantic, a renegade Nazi scientist, Johann Schmidt aka the Red Skull (Hugo Weaving, doing a tremendous Christoph Waltz impression), has happened upon his own supernatural power source, and he’s used it to quietly amass a private army, dubbed HYDRA, that is bent on supplanting Hitler’s world-domination scheme with its own. Soon, all that stands between defeat at the hands HYDRA and its arsenal of advanced weaponry is the juiced-up visage of the newly-christened Captain America.

Portraying a stalwart straight-arrow bereft of angst or ambiguity isn’t the easiest of tasks for any actor, but Evans does a commendable job of bringing depth and humanity to a character that all too easily could have come across as bland and one-dimensional. Johnston seems to recognize this potentiality, as he looks primarily to his supporting cast to supply the personality: Tucci and Weaving stand out, as do Tommy Lee Jones and Toby Jones, playing an irascible army commander and a timid HYDRA toady, respectively. The film’s romantic spark comes courtesy of the principal cast’s lone female representative, the excellent Haley Atwell, playing Rogers’ military liaison, Agent Peggy Carter.

More than anything, Captain America is a triumph of tone. A former ILM technician, Johnston did visual effects for Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Spielberg’s 1981 blockbuster was a conscious touchstone for his film’s throwback feel and aesthetic. (Another, less deliberate influence would be a previous Johnston film, The Rocketeer.) Captain America embodies the spirit of the old serials, melded with a tongue-in-cheek comic sense and punctuated by action sequences that deploy the requisite CGI fireworks with a welcome measure of restraint. The film is decidedly of its era, but never feels gratuitously nostalgic. And its production design is gorgeous: Red Skull’s lair in particular is a treasure trove of retro-futurist designs, all of which seem directly lifted from 1940s World’s Fair exhibits.