I could easily give Captain America: The First Avenger a positive review. It was smart, and well-paced, and funny, too, though in a measured way – somewhere between Green Lantern’s try-really-hard brand of humour, and Christopher Nolan’s straight-laced Batman series. I was all too ready to chalk it up as another of 2011’s Solid Marvel Adaptations. But to put it alongside four-starrers like Thor and X-Men: The Last Stand would be to bare-facedly ignore the niggling unease I keenly felt as the film ended. (And I don’t think it was just the dodgy nachos! Obvious cinema joke, check)
There’s a point about midway through Captain America where Hugo Weaving – playing super-baddie Schmidt, a Nazi who even Nazis find distasteful – gets quite angry and tears his entire face off, revealing an odd-looking, dark-red skull (he is now just called Red Skull). No one really comments on it, either at the time or for the rest of the film, throughout which he maintains his crimson, skeletal demeanour, as though Hugo Weaving’s face isn’t quite angry enough already to practise the evil he has planned.
It’s a nod to the comic-book fans, a reminder that there is a whole legacy of superheroes and supervillains behind this film – but removed as it is from any sort of explanation, it just seems a bit weird to the casual viewer. It neatly sums up the problem of Captain America: it refuses to wallow either in all-out comic-book geekiness or loud, Nazi-bashing fodder for excitable teens, and instead sits on the fence, keeping its audience at a distance.
The script was versatile enough to be acted either po-faced or ironically. Most of the cast, unfortunately, went for the former. Only veterans Tommy Lee Jones and Stanley Tucci, by stepping away from the main action, looked like they were having very much fun; the less-seasoned actors were so focused on – well – acting, that they didn’t try to capture the poking-fun-at-itself essence of the script that, if successfully harnessed, could have been the key ingredient to the film’s success.
That’s my only serious gripe with the acting, though. Chris Evans holds his own in the lead role alongside an ensemble of Hollywood heavyweights, and his developing romance with British officer Peggy, played by Hayley Atwell, is convincingly steamy. Dominic Cooper is more reserved than usual as Howard Stark, Tony Stark’s dad – perhaps he saved his grandiose acting for The Devil’s Double, released 
next week. Hugo Weaving, likewise, is a little flat, relying on the tried-and-tested convention of conveying how evil he is by shouting angrily and in a German accent. (Why mess with the formula, right?)
That niggling feeling I got leaving the cinema was that Captain America doesn’t really know what it is. This silly, catch-all expression, repeated ad absurdum by critics the world over, seems to be the only way to describe a film that steamrolls through Norse Mythology, Self-Esteem Issues, Nazis with Plans of World Domination, An Unlikely Romance and finally ends up on The Hero’s Burden, but doesn’t have the confidence to take any of these for its focus. Captain America feels like a compromise between two different camps with very set ideas on what they wanted; on the one side there are those pushing for a comic-book style light adventure movie, and the other side are pushing just as hard for a big, bold action movie. Rather than combining for ultimate effect, each side pushes just a little too hard and the concept of the film, as well as the film itself, ends up muddied and disorientated.
2.5/5