Reaction: Good, not great.
Bottom-line: An origin tale worth telling is highlighted by a great cast, interesting characters, and a strong story, but is brought down by hurried and uninteresting action sequences, along with an unconvincing villain in Johann Schmidt/The Red Skull.
Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter), Stanley Tucci (Dr. Abraham Erskine), Tommy Lee Jones (Colonel Chester Phillips), Sebastian Stan (Buckey Barnes), and Dominic Cooper (Howard Stark) all deserve praise for their respective performances while the usually diabolic Hugo Weaving (Schmidt/Skull), is pretty much just there because the film needs a villain.
The movie paints Schmidt as intriguing, maniacal, and diabolical, but there's an unshakable sense of "been there, done that" with him. He's simply the next wanna-be Goldfinger churned out on the supervillain factory farm. I never felt like anything was actually at stake, or like the world was ever in any real danger. It's fine. We all know there's a movie coming out next May called The Avengers, which means Captain America had to be victorious over Schmidt in his first solo flick in order to graduate to the group stage. It was more about the process than the respective parts.
Unfortunately, the process was dragged down by some frantically-paced, low-notch action sequences. I usually try and judge an action/adventure movie not on the action itself, but on everything that happens in between the action. Am I still interested when CGI explosions aren't commandeering the screen? Because, if I am, then I've usually just witnessed a pretty good movie. Because I expect the action sequences to take care of themselves. I expect for those, at the very least, to be worth the price of admission.
This summer, and for a number of...well...years now, I suppose, that hasn't been the case. Hollywood action sequences have been lagging for some time now, to the point where I can't abide by my usual criteria. In Captain America, the sequences raced on and off the screen faster than Usain Bolt could have, and one scene I was looking forward to -- the one in the trailer of Cap and the Howling Commandoes storming in together through that door -- fell victim to this worse than most others. What could have been a memorable shot was suddenly happening without any buildup and was over before I blinked.
I understand that a montage is more or less a mash-up of scenes to imply that significant time has passed, but they don't have to be presented as if the remote is stuck on fast forward. But that's exactly what it felt like when Cap and the Commandoes were in the midst of destroying Schmidt's various Hyrda (the Nazi deep science division) bases across all of Europe. A montage can take its time and include some memorable lines and moments (think of the opening montage in Wedding Crashers).
There was something resembling a motorcycle chase through a forest towards the end (which felt like a cheaper, watered-down version of the speeder bike chase from Return of the Jedi on wheels), which gives way to the only serviceable fight scene in the film: One of Cap finally going all out on a group of Hydra soldiers outside of Schmidt's final base. You can catch most of it, here.
One thing director Joe Johnston deserves credit for is filming most of the action set pieces with a steady hand and a wider shot, which allows for us to actually see Cap's punches, kicks, and shield throws. Unfortunately (I keep saying that because I wanted this movie to work on all fronts), not many of the choreographed fight scenes are worth seeing.
But this brings about the larger point about Hollywood action in recent years. Too many blockbusters have gotten it all wrong. If the scenes don't suffer from the shaky "I want it to feel like you could actually be there" effect (Thor, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), then the cameras are literally too close to the action for us to get a good sense of what's really going on (Batman Begins). Call me crazy, but seeing what I think is Batman's torso twist just isn't good enough. I'd like to see him actually land a kick in the gut of the bad guy he's attempting to bring down. That would mean more to me. The flailing torso, followed by a quick edit and the bad guy crumpling to the ground is grounds for a yawn as opposed to a nod of approval.
One other thing I'd love to see more of -- and this is another thing Johnston did right with Captain America on a number of occasions -- is over-the-shoulder work during shooting scenes, so that we see the shooter aiming a gun and firing, and then we see the target drop, all in one shot (think the shots of the German machine gunners in the opening beach storming scene of Saving Private Ryan). I'm sure this takes more time and money than the customary: Guy shoots/quick edit/target falls, but it's always more believable and enjoyable when this approach is taken. Or, if not over the shoulder, at least shoot the scene in a manner that allows the viewer to see the shooter fire and the target get hit all in one shot (like in The Matrix when Keanu Reeves is trying to save Morpheus in the office building and he does the somersault while shooting the M-16 and we see the guards drop right in front of us).
A final note: I'm becoming more and more of a believer in: "If it's not conceivable, just don't do it." Seriously, if, as a filmmaker, you're trying to put together a scene or sequence and you have to rely almost entirely upon CGI, maybe you should go back to the drawing board and find another way to get your point across. I understand that some movies, which employ mythical and science fiction elements, sometimes can't help this, and that's fine. But take a movie like Fast and Furious and think about that final chase scene through all of those hidden caves. It's so unbelievably fake and so heavily reliant upon CGI that it isn't even fun to try and brush it off by suspending disbelief. You see something like that and you can't help but think, "This is so dumb." Which then makes you wonder how a director a producer or a studio could think enough of it to go ahead and make it a crucial part of the movie. Fortunately, Fast Five almost completely abandoned the CGI crap, and what did we get? A much, much better movie and far more enjoyable chase/racing sequences.
If you can't tell, I've put a lot of thought into this in recent years. My biggest fear is that rather than seek to fix these problems, Hollywood will only continue to make them worse.
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