Captain America

*** out of ****

          The list is endless: Spider-Man. Daredevil. Hulk. X-Men. The Punisher. Blade. It seems that each week, a new film adaptation of a Marvel Comics characters is announced, and by now, the sequels. But while we go to packed-out theater houses to watch our favorite heroes in all their glory, in movies loaded with special effects and unbelievably stunts, let us not forget the time in the late eighties and early nineties when Marvel Comics made movies for the price of lunch money. Such attempts included a forgettable version of Swamp Thing, a never-released, low-budget Fantastic Four flick, a boring, made-for-TV Nick Fury movie, and an *ahem* film version of The Punisher that isn't even worthy of mention. Such films allow us to appreciate how far Marvel has come, and Captain America ranks proudly on that list. Or perhaps not so proudly. Hoping to cash in on some of DC Comic's roaring success with Batman: The Movie in 1989, this version of Captain America was immediately rushed into production the following year. As of the time of this review, it remains Marvel Comics' only attempt to put their oldest and most enduring character onto the big screen. Of all of their notorius, 1980/90's film endeavors, this managed to be the best, and at the same time, also the cheesiest.

          Ah, how easy it would be to count the many flaws in this film. Most of the dialogue is cheesy, many of the characters are underdeveloped, and there is simply not enough time spent with Captain America in costume. But let’s do away with all of these laughable elements and focus on the heart of the film, where we find a very sincere, very respectable tribute to the golden-age superhero. If this Cap has its strings out of tune, there is no denying that it is playing with all of its might, and the efforts of the filmmakers shine through in the end. They work well with their limited resources to make a film that is certainly forgettable, but fun while it lasts.

          Without going too much into detail about the nature of the plot, I will say that it successfully sums up sixty years of comics into one movie. The characters of Captain America and his fascist counterpart, the Red Skull (brainchild of Hitler in the comics, created by Mussolini and sold to the Nazis here) are depicted as much more tragic than in the comics. Both are well-constructed and sincerely acted by Matt Salinger and Scott Paulin, and the film is basically a tribute to old 1940s serials with two strong characters taking center stage.

Keep in mind: If every tribute to old movie serials should be as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark, that doesn't make it so. I'm okay with that as long as the said film can manage to be fun, harmless, and entertaining. Captain America manages to be fun, harmless, entertaining, and sincere, so I certainly got more than I expected, especially considering the dark, depressing Batman of the previous year, which worked well as a film but would send any child screaming out of the theater. Unlike the film featuring his dark-cloaked ally, Captain America has appeared in a movie that is for the kids, and the parents should have a good time too, if they can dig their silly hats out of their closets and recognize the nostalgia that the movie is attempting to respect.

Speaking of nostalgia and silly 1940s serials, let's discuss Captain America's utterly preposterous storyline. Every plot point and character, save Cap and the Skull, serve nothing more than to move the story along from action scene to action scene. Many things happen that make little sense; for example, upon being revived in the nineties after being frozen in Alaskan ice for fifty years, Captain America is found by a conspiracy theorist who has been piecing together his story for years. How does the guy find our hero? He just happens to be driving through Northern Canada and stumbles upon him. Now how did he manage that? Canada isn't exactly cover a small enough land mass to identify on any given road the exact person who you are looking for (hell, I live in Juneau, Alaska, which has exactly one highway, and I doubt I could drive its length and find some guy wandering around in the woods... colorful costume or otherwise). In another instance, once the Red Skull realizes that Cap is still alive, the villian determines that the hero must be out to destroy him. Now, Cap has been out of commission for fifty years, and the Red Skull is now a mysterious, Corleone-like kingpin. In this film, they only encountered briefly in the 1940's before Cap was frozen in ice. Why on earth would Skull jump to the conclusion that hey! Cap is thawed out, and his first objective will be to stop the Red Skull? In yet another scene, realizing that the Skull is hiding in Italy, Cap jumps on a plane from the U.S. and flies there. Um...how did he get on board that plane? Surely his passport wasn't preserved with him in the ice?

But never mind. The film isn’t too concerned with plot, and you shouldn't be either. These plot holes, and many like them, are irrelevant to what this film is trying to do: Put our hero in a series of spectacular action scenes and watch how he gets out of them. It is not trying to tell a serious story, it is simply trying to give us some silly, comic-book action in a movie-serial kind of way, and it does just that. Our hero is strapped to a German rocket headed toward the White House; dodges Nazi villains on motorcycles in Northern Canada; is amazed (in some cleverly-written scenes) how many American products are made in former enemy lands of Japan and Germany; fights the Red Skull's henchmen in Italy; and finally has an explosive showdown with the Skull himself in the kingpin's castle, where the villain threatens to blow up all of Western Europe with an atomic bomb which he receives from a piano. All this combined with the fact that the Skull is responsible for the deaths of JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., and now he plans to use a brain transplant to make the new economically-aware U.S. President his slave.

So, I shall reiterate my original point: It is impossible to take this film any more seriously than you would take an old serial or a four-part issue of the Cap comic book, and this kind of treatment is exactly what a Captain America movie needed - the hero needed to be presented as both larger than life and very human, and the movie surrounding him should have been equally over the top and honest. As a result, the low-budget, occasionally hammy acting, and confusing storytelling only add to the film's effect and heighten director Pyun's well-choreographed action sequences. There is just something grand and, gee whiz, patriotic about the President of the United States leaping from a tower in order to keep the Skull from using him in his experiments, only to be successfully caught and saved by Captain America, who is crawling up the wall vigorously. In real life, this would have ripped both their arms out of their sockets, but in this movie, what difference does it make? It's such a well-shot scene, and if you can't believe that Captain America is capable of such a stunning rescue, it is your heart in the wrong place, not the movie's.

Cap and Skull are well-developed, and they hold remind the audience of the film's sincerity when it threatens to go over-the-top in its comic-book silliness. Cap fails to defeat the Skull in the 1940s; is frozen and thawed out and learns that, because he failed to defeat the Skull, his arch villain is responsible for the deaths of many historic figures. Feeling he has failed his country, plus realizing his former girlfriend is now old with a family of her own, Cap is a determined, melancholy hero with nothing to lose. There is a sincerity to the part that Matt Salinger brings: With his naivety and his boyish good looks, it looks as if Cap is truly a hero from the 1940s who has stepped out of his time and into ours, and he is utterly amazed at the changes that have come (though attempts to give him lines featuring old 40's terms such as "Gee-wiz" and "holy mackerel" don't come off so well). The Red Skull watched the slaughter of his family as a small boy in the 1930s, and this life-shattering event that led to his transformation into the monster he now is. His repressed pain and depression has fueled his hatred and embittered him over the decades. In a film which emphasizes overacting, he probably has the subtlest role, yet he still has the film's best over-the-top lines ("Assassination isn't worth the trouble. It took two years to find Sir Hans. Three to find Oswald. The King job alone cost us over twenty two million dollars. What do we get for our troubles? Saints. Martyrs to the cause."). Just like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II (though on a much smaller level, to be sure), in the film's final scenes, he builds himself up as a great, powerful crime lord, but to the viewer, he simply comes across as pitiful.

In the end, Captain America is a fun, low-budget, patriotic, feel-good action flick which works in a Saturday Matinee sort of way, and it doesn't strive to be anything much more profound. While never released to theaters here in the U.S., it made the theaters, perhaps ironically, overseas and, as a result, built the bridge for the bigger-budgeted, more-serious Marvel Superhero movies that came years later and are still to come. Curiously, I find it more appealing than most of the Marvel adaptations of late, whose hearts seem to be in the way the movies look. Captain America is all about the way the movie, and its hero, feels, and for all of its silliness, it remains thoroughly watchable.

Cast:
Matt Salinger: Captain America
Scott Paulin: The Red Skull
Ronny Cox: President Kimball
Ned Beatty: Sam Kolawetz
Darren McGavin: General Fleming
Kim Gillingham: Sharon/Bernie

Colombia/TriStar presents a 21st Century Film Corporation release. Directed by Albert Pyun. Written by Stephen Tolkin and Lawrence Block. Based on the characters created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, for Marvel Comics. Rated PG-13 for comic book violence, a few intense deaths and some language. Running time: 97 minutes. Year of release: 1990.