Quit Bucky

I had a whole sack of points and elaborations prepared about how, among all the comic-book characters out there, Captain America was one that I was very excited about an adaptation of.

This is mainly about the action. Look at the Marvel Ultimate Alliance franchise and Cap is one of the more enjoyable characters to utilise (at least for me). He has a shield, a physically separate weapon which makes his moves and combination of moves one of the coolest this side of a very complicated Spider-man simulation (or Kyle Rayner). He can throw it and wait for it to boomerang/ricochet back to him. He can use it as a shield, he can uppercut people with it, he can bull-ram people with it. So cool, and something very visual that could be translated very well onto the big screen.

There's also a bit about the character himself. I'm no big Cap fan. I know some general things and that's about it. The movie starts off him being the little underdog guy. We'll see his transformation and there's a nice relationship between Chris Evans (Cap) and Stanley Tucci (Dr. Erskine) here. I was also surprised that Bucky Barnes (played by Sebastian Stan) is here. People who know the story know how this develops and it's certainly a good plot opening.

So its pretty great, but only on paper. I saw the movie and everything came out a bit poorer than I wanted. The Erskine relationship is pretty good, and Hayley Atwell does a good Peggy Carter (falters in the end). Tommy Lee Jones was fun as a military dude here, but sort of formulaic.

There's a cast of commandos who help out Cap later in the movie but they aren't very interesting. I can recall Dum Dum Dugan because the name is familiar and not by any favourable trait in this treatment. Hugo Weaving has this pretty classic pop Nazi German accent that sort of leaves him in some sequences (also a bit of Dr. Strangelove). He's never scary here but he's okay in some parts, but almost invisible in other parts. The enemy simply is not scary except for one sequence when the Allied soldiers are being vaporised by the laser rifles Hydra (the big enemy outfit) has.

A lot of bits are awkward in the sense that you want to be all excited. They are action sequences after all, but you just can't make yourself feel up. They (the action sequences) should be great, but all the explosions happen behind the screen. Nothing reaches you. Even the fighting I was so excited about failed me.

I'm not sure I can pin everything on one key fault. My general conclusion would be that the treatment was a bit pitchy. The burden of being an origin story requires it to have a small dose of melodrama (achieved), but it also has to be exciting and maybe establish characters and open plot points. All this under a good runtime. The thing here is that the first scene of the movie is set in the present, seventy odd years after all the other scenes. We see that Cap is alive and well, and it's served subtly that it's highly likely all the people in the big part of the movie are dead or have no continuity.

I would have liked it if they had edited a bit. The part of Cap doing a Joseph Mazello in The Pacific could have been replaced with Cap wasting away on base since, well, he hasn't really trained and we're given no indication that he has fighting skills (that last bit was very awkward). Another is Bucky. I think it would have been a stronger film if we scrapped the character (although unfaithful) and the ensuing plot opening. It's a weak point and the runtime could have served better if it were scenes that enforced some of the other points like Hugo Weaving's Red Skull being a legit bad guy.

(Captain America: The First Avenger - Joe Johnston)