(John Michael McDonagh, 2011)
In the years immediately following the release of Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino's influence on cinema was massive. Mainstream action blockbusters got sidetracked by scenes where characters discussed pop culture minutae. Every single low-budget crime film tried to play with pulp conventions by utilising quirky takes on archetypes or infusing stockly generic situations with a sort of realism. It didn't last long, however. Tarantino is hard to get right - he himself has struggled in a couple of works since - and a film can look thoroughly pawltry if it tries and fails to ape his work.
But in another way, Tarantino has been internalized by pop culture. When a film combines crime thriller plot elements with blackly comic dialogue, seemingly random cultural references and some homages to classic or cultish cinema, the audience has a point of reference. Nobody is confused by this mixture. In theatre, Martin McDonagh has made such a mix his own in a series of savage, hilarious plays mainly set in the West of Ireland. He softened that sensibility for his first feature, In Bruges. Now his brother, John Michael McDonagh makes his debut as writer-director, and there is a definite family resemblance.
The Guard is a crime thriller with more laughs than thrills, and adds to its quietly Tarantino-esque pleasures an inimitably Irish viewpoint which gives it a refreshing, soulful quality also present in In Bruges. It shares a star with that film, and Brendan Gleeson is terrific here; suggesting the depth and ambiguity of his Galway Police Sergeant inside his first scene but always funny, charismatic and entertaining to watch. He also has abundant chemistry with Don Cheadle as the fish-out-water FBI Officer stunned by his attitude.
The Guard, Cheadle aside, is incredibly Irish, as if McDonagh set out to reflect the moods and variety of the country and its people in his film, which is melancholy yet jolly, coal black yet hilarious, violent yet tender, warm yet stoic in the face of strong emotion, rambling, foul-mouthed, literate yet cinematic, bawdy, witty and even a little moving.
It has a sure feel for the landscape and language of the Irish West, bleakly empty and beautiful and filled with slyly, dryly funny eccentrics. McDonagh fills it with big 'scope images of the yawning skies above Connemara and its expanses of green stretching off to the horizon, his figures isolated in corners of the large frame. The obvious Leone reference is underlined by the Morricone pastiche of the soundtrack, which in turn points up the big Western-style moral choice of the climax, when Gleeson's Boyle has a "man's gotta do" moment.
Perhaps surprisingly, the Western echoes fit snugly alongside McDonaghs terrific dialogue, which allows Drug smugglers to quote Nietzsche, reference Bertrand Russell and ponder the lyrics of "Ode to Billy Joe", while Boyle himself discusses Gogol and listens to Chet Baker.
The supporting cast is excellent, with such reliable actors as Liam Cunningham and Mark Strong offering casually great work and plainly loving McDonagh's writing.
In the end, the funny stuff stops and there is gunplay, death and reckoning. Yet somehow, McDonagh makes that work too. His first film is a rousingly satisfying experience and suggests that he may have a fine, fascinating career awaiting him.
Monday, 22 August 2011
Thursday, 18 August 2011
CONAN THE BARBARIAN
(John Milius, 1982)
Robert E Howard's "Conan" stories are pulp at it's most fevered and breathless. Howard loved his creation and the world he put him in, and that passion is obvious in his writing; vivid and excited, his descriptions of violence and sex are adolescent and stirring, the intensity undeniable and addictive. John Milius takes himself a lot more seriously than anybody making a movie of such material ought to, and so the tone of his Conan the Barbarian is odd, dissonances obvious throughout.
Milius has something serious in mind, and as such his film begins with a Nietzsche quote (no matter that its the most bumper sticker Nietzsche line possible), takes much of its worldview from Nietzsche, and features some portentious exchanges about pagan gods, philosophy (prompting Conan's famous line about what is "best in life", which Milius cribbed from Genghis Khan) and even a good dose of satirical intent. The "snake cult" who represent the villains here are an amusing shot at hippies and new age living, and Conan's violent destruction of their organisation very much a right-wing fantasy.
But for all that, the script (co-written by Oliver Stone) takes many scenes and ideas straight from the pages of Howard, and so there are sorceresses, giant snakes, charming thieves and usurper kings here, bound together by a series of often semi-incompetently staged action scenes. Milius isn't interested in action, but that is the heart of Conan; he is a Warrior, a fearsome, almost unbeatable one, something that Howard underlines with plenty of fight and battle sequences, and something that is rarely communicated by this film. Still, it works. Schwarzenegger cannot even project emotion, but his presence is inarguable, his charisma obvious even in this early lead. He may lack the ferocity and cunning of Howard's Conan, but he is a movie star, even here. Milius casts around him with some class - James Earl Jones and Max Von Sydow show up - and Sandahl Bergman is good value as Conan's Valkyrie lover, Valeria, while a series of smoking hot Euro-babes, some of them soft core stars like Nadiuska, who appears fleetingly but memorably as Conan's mother, appear in small parts.
The production design is handsome and the lovely Spanish locations give the whole enterprise a surprising whiff of the spaghetti Western, gritty and battered, suggesting an ancient World and old gods.
It is beautifully shot with a genuinely epic sweep, and Basil Poledouris' fantastic score is perhaps the films true star: rousing, romantic, melodic and thunderous, it is one of the best soundtracks of the 1980s, and contributes immeasurably to the films majesty.
By the end, Milius has made Conan a sort of Nietzschean übermensch, killing his "father" in order to replace him (a similar ending to Milius' script for Apocalypse Now and his friend George Lucas' Star Wars saga) and taken elements from lots of cultural sources; samurai cinema, the European Epics of the '50s and '60s and John Ford. The influence of Ford is telling; Milius is an old-fashioned director, and his scenes play out solidly, often a little stiffly, without the spark or imagination some filmmakers might have brought to the material.
But Conan does at least punch out a camel.......
Robert E Howard's "Conan" stories are pulp at it's most fevered and breathless. Howard loved his creation and the world he put him in, and that passion is obvious in his writing; vivid and excited, his descriptions of violence and sex are adolescent and stirring, the intensity undeniable and addictive. John Milius takes himself a lot more seriously than anybody making a movie of such material ought to, and so the tone of his Conan the Barbarian is odd, dissonances obvious throughout.
Milius has something serious in mind, and as such his film begins with a Nietzsche quote (no matter that its the most bumper sticker Nietzsche line possible), takes much of its worldview from Nietzsche, and features some portentious exchanges about pagan gods, philosophy (prompting Conan's famous line about what is "best in life", which Milius cribbed from Genghis Khan) and even a good dose of satirical intent. The "snake cult" who represent the villains here are an amusing shot at hippies and new age living, and Conan's violent destruction of their organisation very much a right-wing fantasy.
But for all that, the script (co-written by Oliver Stone) takes many scenes and ideas straight from the pages of Howard, and so there are sorceresses, giant snakes, charming thieves and usurper kings here, bound together by a series of often semi-incompetently staged action scenes. Milius isn't interested in action, but that is the heart of Conan; he is a Warrior, a fearsome, almost unbeatable one, something that Howard underlines with plenty of fight and battle sequences, and something that is rarely communicated by this film. Still, it works. Schwarzenegger cannot even project emotion, but his presence is inarguable, his charisma obvious even in this early lead. He may lack the ferocity and cunning of Howard's Conan, but he is a movie star, even here. Milius casts around him with some class - James Earl Jones and Max Von Sydow show up - and Sandahl Bergman is good value as Conan's Valkyrie lover, Valeria, while a series of smoking hot Euro-babes, some of them soft core stars like Nadiuska, who appears fleetingly but memorably as Conan's mother, appear in small parts.
The production design is handsome and the lovely Spanish locations give the whole enterprise a surprising whiff of the spaghetti Western, gritty and battered, suggesting an ancient World and old gods.
It is beautifully shot with a genuinely epic sweep, and Basil Poledouris' fantastic score is perhaps the films true star: rousing, romantic, melodic and thunderous, it is one of the best soundtracks of the 1980s, and contributes immeasurably to the films majesty.
By the end, Milius has made Conan a sort of Nietzschean übermensch, killing his "father" in order to replace him (a similar ending to Milius' script for Apocalypse Now and his friend George Lucas' Star Wars saga) and taken elements from lots of cultural sources; samurai cinema, the European Epics of the '50s and '60s and John Ford. The influence of Ford is telling; Milius is an old-fashioned director, and his scenes play out solidly, often a little stiffly, without the spark or imagination some filmmakers might have brought to the material.
But Conan does at least punch out a camel.......
Monday, 15 August 2011
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
(Rupert Wyatt, 2011)
The central section of Rise of the Planet of the Apes contains perhaps the best purely cinematic storytelling of any of this Summers blockbusters. That is when the human characters - never the movies strength, to be honest - fade into the background, and the narrative focuses almost entirely on chimpanzee Caesar and his experiences in an Ape Pound. Here we are shown what is basically a Primate Prison movie, with Caesar the young innocent having to learn the ropes on the inside, surviving violence and intimidation. Andy Serkis provided the visual references for the cgi, and he and the effects are marvellous in these sequences. Director Wyatt knows exactly what he is doing. His shot choices can be beautiful, and in the climactic scenes are often exhilaratingly spectacular, as well as eerie and often blackly comic, but they never weaken the muscular storytelling on display. He lays out the geography of this prison, clarifies the characters and conflicts, and moves the whole thing along at a nicely gripping pace.
But that is true of the film as a whole. Despite the void at the centre of the main human characters, who all seem cardboard cut-outs, even James Franco's "hero" (and especially Freida Pinto's pointless girlfriend), the exposition in the first act is done effectively and without tedium, and after that a note of dread enters proceedings and is made shriller as the film advances towards its climax.
By then, audience sympathy lies almost entirely with the monkeys. The villainous humans - cartoonishly personified by David Oyelowo in a suit and glasses - make sure of that.
The climax is occasionally magnificent and always stirring, even if the plot does contain some logical slips and the non-Ape characterisation is so disappointing. The set-pieces allow Wyatt to pull off some great, original shots, like the trees shedding leaves onto a suburban street as chimpanzees swing through the canopy or the mist-obscured Golden Gate bridge turned into a battleground. The references to the original series of Planet of the Apes films here are mostly subtle and even witty.
All that would be for nought, however, if Caesar's story didn't move viewers. But move them it does, and that puts this film in that rare position; this is a vastly superior summer blockbuster, uncommonly intelligent, engrossing and brilliantly made.
The central section of Rise of the Planet of the Apes contains perhaps the best purely cinematic storytelling of any of this Summers blockbusters. That is when the human characters - never the movies strength, to be honest - fade into the background, and the narrative focuses almost entirely on chimpanzee Caesar and his experiences in an Ape Pound. Here we are shown what is basically a Primate Prison movie, with Caesar the young innocent having to learn the ropes on the inside, surviving violence and intimidation. Andy Serkis provided the visual references for the cgi, and he and the effects are marvellous in these sequences. Director Wyatt knows exactly what he is doing. His shot choices can be beautiful, and in the climactic scenes are often exhilaratingly spectacular, as well as eerie and often blackly comic, but they never weaken the muscular storytelling on display. He lays out the geography of this prison, clarifies the characters and conflicts, and moves the whole thing along at a nicely gripping pace.
But that is true of the film as a whole. Despite the void at the centre of the main human characters, who all seem cardboard cut-outs, even James Franco's "hero" (and especially Freida Pinto's pointless girlfriend), the exposition in the first act is done effectively and without tedium, and after that a note of dread enters proceedings and is made shriller as the film advances towards its climax.
By then, audience sympathy lies almost entirely with the monkeys. The villainous humans - cartoonishly personified by David Oyelowo in a suit and glasses - make sure of that.
The climax is occasionally magnificent and always stirring, even if the plot does contain some logical slips and the non-Ape characterisation is so disappointing. The set-pieces allow Wyatt to pull off some great, original shots, like the trees shedding leaves onto a suburban street as chimpanzees swing through the canopy or the mist-obscured Golden Gate bridge turned into a battleground. The references to the original series of Planet of the Apes films here are mostly subtle and even witty.
All that would be for nought, however, if Caesar's story didn't move viewers. But move them it does, and that puts this film in that rare position; this is a vastly superior summer blockbuster, uncommonly intelligent, engrossing and brilliantly made.
Sunday, 14 August 2011
CARS 2
(John Lasseter, Brad Lewis, 2011)
We expect so much of Pixar. This is a company which primarily makes films for children, yet, such has been the success and popularity of those films, so transcendent have a handful been, telling tales which work equally well for adults, with great sophistication, wit and beauty, that we expect miracles with each and every release. We expect dazzling storytelling in the service of tales full of drama yet laced with comedy, we expect strong, simple characterisation with an underlying resonance and complexity, we expect an effortless visual splendour and a sort of mythic weight to the narrative and light, piercing cultural references and a warmth of sensibility, and massive, original action sequences, and movie stars giving voice performances without distracting us, and an emotional charge. We expect a lot of Pixar, in other words.
Cars was probably the least critically successful of the companies previous films. A breezy, old-fashioned Doc Hollywood retread, it is a nice little film. But those expectations mean that was never going to be enough. So Cars 2, the most outright Kid-friendly of all Pixars films, and a bright, poppy, thematically thin mix of spy farce and race movie, was always bound to take some critical flak.
It makes Mater, the major source of comic relief in the first film, the main character. He is a broad creation and the film takes its lead from him, with many fish-out-of-water gags as he cuts a swathe through Japan, Italy and England, mistaken for a US Secret Agent throughout and fluking his way through a couple of extended action set-pieces along the way. Some of the spy pastiche material - with Michael Caine slightly miscast as the legendary Britih Spy Fin McMasters - recalls the previous Pixar masterpiece The Incredibles, but here the target audience is firmly six years old, and Cars 2 does an impressive, whole-hearted job in wooing that audience, with lots of slapstick and sight gags, and a brighter, more simplified storytelling approach than ever before. Many of those expectations are fulfilled, sure, but Cars 2 simply isn't interested in being a "typical" Pixar film. It just wants to be fun for a five year old.
We expect so much of Pixar. This is a company which primarily makes films for children, yet, such has been the success and popularity of those films, so transcendent have a handful been, telling tales which work equally well for adults, with great sophistication, wit and beauty, that we expect miracles with each and every release. We expect dazzling storytelling in the service of tales full of drama yet laced with comedy, we expect strong, simple characterisation with an underlying resonance and complexity, we expect an effortless visual splendour and a sort of mythic weight to the narrative and light, piercing cultural references and a warmth of sensibility, and massive, original action sequences, and movie stars giving voice performances without distracting us, and an emotional charge. We expect a lot of Pixar, in other words.
Cars was probably the least critically successful of the companies previous films. A breezy, old-fashioned Doc Hollywood retread, it is a nice little film. But those expectations mean that was never going to be enough. So Cars 2, the most outright Kid-friendly of all Pixars films, and a bright, poppy, thematically thin mix of spy farce and race movie, was always bound to take some critical flak.
It makes Mater, the major source of comic relief in the first film, the main character. He is a broad creation and the film takes its lead from him, with many fish-out-of-water gags as he cuts a swathe through Japan, Italy and England, mistaken for a US Secret Agent throughout and fluking his way through a couple of extended action set-pieces along the way. Some of the spy pastiche material - with Michael Caine slightly miscast as the legendary Britih Spy Fin McMasters - recalls the previous Pixar masterpiece The Incredibles, but here the target audience is firmly six years old, and Cars 2 does an impressive, whole-hearted job in wooing that audience, with lots of slapstick and sight gags, and a brighter, more simplified storytelling approach than ever before. Many of those expectations are fulfilled, sure, but Cars 2 simply isn't interested in being a "typical" Pixar film. It just wants to be fun for a five year old.
Friday, 12 August 2011
FASTER
(George Tillman Jr, 2010)
Lean, tough and narratively streamlined, Faster is a revenge thriller done '70s style.
That means it has a grindhouse quality most evident in the visceral relish applied to the violence. Gunfights are loud and bloody. Fistfights are brief, brutal, agonising. Car chases are ferociously quick and thrilling. People are coldly executed, throats cut, shot in the head, stabbed repeatedly.
Yet it's never boring or repetitive. Tillman keeps it moderately stylish throughout - while never allowing it to be less than gritty - and the script is nicely paced, presenting the characters with appealing clarity and providing some witty dialogue. The main figures appear archetypes, at first. The Driver, The Cop and The Killer. Yet over the course of the film each is given a little depth, a smidgen of complexity, which makes the three-way confrontation at the climax all the more satisfying.
This is a film that understands the power of pulp, that sees which cliches work, and knows how best to apply them. The revenge thriller is an easy genre, in a way, but it's rarely done quite so well as it is here. The mission is established before the credits have finished, the stakes set up within a half hour, and then we just watch it twist it's way to a bloody conclusion.
Dwayne Johnson is obviously terrific in Tillman's vigorous action sequences, but he does well containing his natural warmth and humour throughout, presenting his Driver as a being driven purely on hate and finding that hard. The rest of a fine cast are impressive, and the sense of a surprisingly classy enterprise is further enhanced by Clint Mansell's great score.
An action film as they should be: taut, powerful, direct. Like a punch to the solar plexus.
Lean, tough and narratively streamlined, Faster is a revenge thriller done '70s style.
That means it has a grindhouse quality most evident in the visceral relish applied to the violence. Gunfights are loud and bloody. Fistfights are brief, brutal, agonising. Car chases are ferociously quick and thrilling. People are coldly executed, throats cut, shot in the head, stabbed repeatedly.
Yet it's never boring or repetitive. Tillman keeps it moderately stylish throughout - while never allowing it to be less than gritty - and the script is nicely paced, presenting the characters with appealing clarity and providing some witty dialogue. The main figures appear archetypes, at first. The Driver, The Cop and The Killer. Yet over the course of the film each is given a little depth, a smidgen of complexity, which makes the three-way confrontation at the climax all the more satisfying.
This is a film that understands the power of pulp, that sees which cliches work, and knows how best to apply them. The revenge thriller is an easy genre, in a way, but it's rarely done quite so well as it is here. The mission is established before the credits have finished, the stakes set up within a half hour, and then we just watch it twist it's way to a bloody conclusion.
Dwayne Johnson is obviously terrific in Tillman's vigorous action sequences, but he does well containing his natural warmth and humour throughout, presenting his Driver as a being driven purely on hate and finding that hard. The rest of a fine cast are impressive, and the sense of a surprisingly classy enterprise is further enhanced by Clint Mansell's great score.
An action film as they should be: taut, powerful, direct. Like a punch to the solar plexus.
Monday, 8 August 2011
SUPER 8
(J.J. Abrams, 2011)
Steven Spielberg's influence is so thorough and complete in the ways we produce, market and consume Blockbuster Cinema that it is difficult to overstate the effect his work has had upon American film. But few films dare to ape Spielberg's actual style or interests. For his follow-up to Star Trek, J.J. Abrams got Spielberg involved as a producer, and the result, the gently 80s-retro Super 8, is no less than a Spielberg pastiche, using Spielbergian visual motifs, Spielbergian music, accessing Spielbergian biographical detail - the geeky teens making their own movie - in a Spielbergian setting (generic yet idealised lower middle-class small-town America) all in an attempt to evoke a big Spielbergian surge of awed, dewy emotion.
That much it does well. There are many good things here: the core group of boys are terrific; playing recognisable types, they share a beautifully unforced chemistry as they bicker and make each other laugh in what is one of the best portrayals of boyhood friendship I've ever seen. Abrams excels with all of the set-up: the situation of the young hero, living with his widowed Father, his crush on a girl from school, and the enthusiasm and energy they all put into making their super-8 zombie movie is all grounded in a vividly atmospheric world with a tangible sense of place. Kyle Chandler, so consistently excellent on television in Friday Night Lights, is good here also, while Noah Emmerich is an effortlessly hissable military villain.
But that is part of the problem with Super 8; early on, it's a charming, nicely observed, impeccably shot (except for Abrams' habitual overuse of lens flares, which crop up again and again) story of small town boyhood. The genre component, while authentically Spielberian, is the films weakness. Some of the suspenseful set-pieces are well-done, but mostly it's derivative and horribly over-familiar in conception and execution. The E.T. echoes pile up, only without E.T.s quality. The creature design is almost comically predictable, and the final action sequence tame and anti-climactic.
Of course that's because the real climax is the emotional crescendo reached in the final scene, where Abrams seeks to evoke the big emotional thunderclaps familiar from early Spielberg. Only he never quite pulls it off. Michael Giacchino's soundtrack does much of the work, but Gacchino is no John Williams, and Abrams, for all his efforts, is no Spielberg, and so it ends on an emotional surge, but perhaps not quite as powerful as it could be.
Steven Spielberg's influence is so thorough and complete in the ways we produce, market and consume Blockbuster Cinema that it is difficult to overstate the effect his work has had upon American film. But few films dare to ape Spielberg's actual style or interests. For his follow-up to Star Trek, J.J. Abrams got Spielberg involved as a producer, and the result, the gently 80s-retro Super 8, is no less than a Spielberg pastiche, using Spielbergian visual motifs, Spielbergian music, accessing Spielbergian biographical detail - the geeky teens making their own movie - in a Spielbergian setting (generic yet idealised lower middle-class small-town America) all in an attempt to evoke a big Spielbergian surge of awed, dewy emotion.
That much it does well. There are many good things here: the core group of boys are terrific; playing recognisable types, they share a beautifully unforced chemistry as they bicker and make each other laugh in what is one of the best portrayals of boyhood friendship I've ever seen. Abrams excels with all of the set-up: the situation of the young hero, living with his widowed Father, his crush on a girl from school, and the enthusiasm and energy they all put into making their super-8 zombie movie is all grounded in a vividly atmospheric world with a tangible sense of place. Kyle Chandler, so consistently excellent on television in Friday Night Lights, is good here also, while Noah Emmerich is an effortlessly hissable military villain.
But that is part of the problem with Super 8; early on, it's a charming, nicely observed, impeccably shot (except for Abrams' habitual overuse of lens flares, which crop up again and again) story of small town boyhood. The genre component, while authentically Spielberian, is the films weakness. Some of the suspenseful set-pieces are well-done, but mostly it's derivative and horribly over-familiar in conception and execution. The E.T. echoes pile up, only without E.T.s quality. The creature design is almost comically predictable, and the final action sequence tame and anti-climactic.
Of course that's because the real climax is the emotional crescendo reached in the final scene, where Abrams seeks to evoke the big emotional thunderclaps familiar from early Spielberg. Only he never quite pulls it off. Michael Giacchino's soundtrack does much of the work, but Gacchino is no John Williams, and Abrams, for all his efforts, is no Spielberg, and so it ends on an emotional surge, but perhaps not quite as powerful as it could be.
Tuesday, 2 August 2011
CAPTAIN AMERICA
(Joe Johnston, 2011)
Like Superman, Captain America is a character much-derided by those (lets call them casual Super-hero fans) who favour edgier, seemingly more complex modern Super-heroes such as Batman, Spider-Man and Wolverine. That is somewhat understandable. On the surface, he seems an overly-literal, simple-minded creation. Visually he is a walking flag, resplendent in red White and blue, his costume encompassing both stars and stripes, together with little (eagle?) wings on the mask. His creation as a propaganda tool during the Second World War now makes him seem dated and irrelevant. His characterisation can be - in the wrong creative hands - reductive and silly, restricting him to the role of the big strong boy scout. Then there is the shield...
Well, Johnston's fun blockbuster addresses most of these issues and displays a fine understanding of just what makes the character of Captain America so compelling. Nicely grounded with a vivid grasp of a certain sort of zippily pop-cultural view of the Second World War which is perfectly suited to the character, the film spends its first act establishing its characters and making Chris Evans' Steve Rogers a truly likeable and sympathetic underdog. With the classical simplicity which is very much a hallmark of Marvels best characters, also present whenever nerdy Peter Parker cuts loose as the wiseass god of skyscrapers Spider-Man or when weedy, repressed Bruce Banner gives into his rage and levels buildings as the Hulk, Rogers' transformation into the "Super Soldier" Captain is made tremendously satisfying by how realistic, convincingly mounted and well-acted his sickly asthmatic beginnings are.
Indeed, Captain America gets its textures right throughout, stealing liberally from Raiders of the Lost Ark and sprinkling in some nice retro-futurist designs for its Hydra villains Nazis-with-black-magic World. There is also some wit in the details; the sequence where Rogers is used as a propaganda tool for selling War Bonds may just be the films best passage and actually provides an explanation for the ridiculous symbolism of that costume.
The cast give good accounts of themselves: Evans is convincing and winning throughout and effortlessly handles the action scenes, Tommy Lee-Jones is as good as ever in a one-note part, Hayley Atwell makes her vague cypher of an idealised strong 1940s Woman relatable and even affecting, and Hugo Weaving manages to make the Red Skull both disturbing and hilarious with what seems an outright Werner Herzog impersonation. The action scenes are competent if never inspired, but the patient pacing of the love story and Rogers' growth as a hero give it a surprising emotional charge by the slightly underwhelming, somewhat rote, underexplained climax. The coda, then, seems bizarre and even an attempt to shortchange the audience in advance of next years massive all-star The Avengers, which will feature this hero alongside Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk and Hawkeye.
It is also more than a little overlong, but its visual richness and the ease of the storytelling mean that Captain America mostly works as a fun summer blockbuster in its own right.
Like Superman, Captain America is a character much-derided by those (lets call them casual Super-hero fans) who favour edgier, seemingly more complex modern Super-heroes such as Batman, Spider-Man and Wolverine. That is somewhat understandable. On the surface, he seems an overly-literal, simple-minded creation. Visually he is a walking flag, resplendent in red White and blue, his costume encompassing both stars and stripes, together with little (eagle?) wings on the mask. His creation as a propaganda tool during the Second World War now makes him seem dated and irrelevant. His characterisation can be - in the wrong creative hands - reductive and silly, restricting him to the role of the big strong boy scout. Then there is the shield...
Well, Johnston's fun blockbuster addresses most of these issues and displays a fine understanding of just what makes the character of Captain America so compelling. Nicely grounded with a vivid grasp of a certain sort of zippily pop-cultural view of the Second World War which is perfectly suited to the character, the film spends its first act establishing its characters and making Chris Evans' Steve Rogers a truly likeable and sympathetic underdog. With the classical simplicity which is very much a hallmark of Marvels best characters, also present whenever nerdy Peter Parker cuts loose as the wiseass god of skyscrapers Spider-Man or when weedy, repressed Bruce Banner gives into his rage and levels buildings as the Hulk, Rogers' transformation into the "Super Soldier" Captain is made tremendously satisfying by how realistic, convincingly mounted and well-acted his sickly asthmatic beginnings are.
Indeed, Captain America gets its textures right throughout, stealing liberally from Raiders of the Lost Ark and sprinkling in some nice retro-futurist designs for its Hydra villains Nazis-with-black-magic World. There is also some wit in the details; the sequence where Rogers is used as a propaganda tool for selling War Bonds may just be the films best passage and actually provides an explanation for the ridiculous symbolism of that costume.
The cast give good accounts of themselves: Evans is convincing and winning throughout and effortlessly handles the action scenes, Tommy Lee-Jones is as good as ever in a one-note part, Hayley Atwell makes her vague cypher of an idealised strong 1940s Woman relatable and even affecting, and Hugo Weaving manages to make the Red Skull both disturbing and hilarious with what seems an outright Werner Herzog impersonation. The action scenes are competent if never inspired, but the patient pacing of the love story and Rogers' growth as a hero give it a surprising emotional charge by the slightly underwhelming, somewhat rote, underexplained climax. The coda, then, seems bizarre and even an attempt to shortchange the audience in advance of next years massive all-star The Avengers, which will feature this hero alongside Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk and Hawkeye.
It is also more than a little overlong, but its visual richness and the ease of the storytelling mean that Captain America mostly works as a fun summer blockbuster in its own right.
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