Chris Evans stars in a scene from Captain America: The First Avenger.
Friend, are you feeling low-down, run-down, downright puny? Do the bigger kids at school slam you into your locker when you quote lines from fantasy-action films? Does that girl you secretly adore refuse your offer to take her to the umpteenth Marvel comics movie? Well, friend, you may be suffering from Superhero Overload. Seeing all those epics about the overmuscled macho dudes from the Marvel universe — Spider-Man and the Hulk and Iron Man and Thor and endless X-Men — has drained your fevered brain. So approach Captain America: The First Avenger with caution. It could leave you super-pooped and quite possibly super-duped.
Movie genres, no less than great civilizations, have their periods of ascent and descent. Musicals, Westerns and the dead-serious romance have all flourished, then nearly perished. Now the superhero format looks close to being spent. In the late 1930s and early '40s the paradigm was born, as a babysitter for Saturday-matinee kids, in the form of B-minus serials in 12 to 15 weekly chapters; Captain America was one such chapter play, the first Marvel character to make it to the big screen. Comic-book heroes didn't graduate to "A" movies until the 1978 Superman; then the 2002 Spider-Man opened the floodgates. Now every summer boasts a platoon of steel-jawed planet-savers. This one already had Thor, X-Men: First Class and Green Lantern, with new segments of Pirates of the Caribbean and Transformers adding to the genre glut, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Conan the Barbarian coming in August. Can you wonder that connoisseurs sag from ennui?
On its own, Captain America is a modestly engaging little-big movie in the median range: well below the first Iron Man, somewhat above X-Men: First Class. It approaches one of Marvel's earliest good guys, created in 1941 by writer Joe Simon and illustrator Jack Kirby, with the utmost reverence. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley, who wrote the Narnia films and You Kill Me have faithfully adapted the origins story of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a little guy, beset by bullies, who's gung-ho to go to war and is enlisted in a secret Army project that transforms him from a 90-pound weakling into a Charles Atlas figure who can outrun a speeding taxi and battle Hitler's most potent mad scientist. That would be Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), aka the Red Skull, in a sneering-villain guise with the bone structure of Kevin Bacon (First Class' main meanie) and the Teutonic vocal timbre of Werner Herzog. Director Joe Johnson choreographs some cool chases, and the production team provides a loving reimagining of New York in the '40s.
The only problem is that we've been there — been nearly everywhere Captain America goes — in countless previous movies. The undergrown underdog could be Peter Parker before he became Spider-Man. Steve's skill set isn't so special, since it's served a dozen or more superheroes. The infiltration of a fantasy story into historical events was used in X-Men: First Class, where Charles Xavier and his mutant gang averted the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, for that matter, in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, another chimerical rewrite of U.S. soldiers' efforts to bring down Nazi Germany. We get it: G.I. Joe killed Hitler — though, really, it was the Soviet Army that exhausted his troops, and Hitler killed himself.