I do like a comic book movie every now and again and I suppose I was drawn to Captain America: First Avenger having really enjoyed X-Men: First Class. That and it being a bit of mid-week escapism.
Like First Class, it's a 'how'd it all start' film set during the second world war and telling the tale of how puny, army-reject Steve Rogers becomes the beefcake, shield-wielding super hero Captain America. So the first half is his journey and the second half his first mission.
The film is chocker full of fab Brit actors, some in painfully small cameos (and they aren't all baddies either). Hayley Atwell is just gorgeous as the feisty, intelligent, love interest, there's a briefish appearance of the lovely Richard Armitage, Dominic Cooper does a great turn as the suave Howard Stark and the totally charming JJ Feild is sorely underused with only about three lines of dialogue.
It fair takes your breath away but aside from one or two nice lines that's about all it's got going for it. You see I found it dull, dull, dull.
Steve Rogers lacks depth and shade as a character. All we know about him is he wants to enlist, keeps getting rejected on health grounds and will take a beating in the name of patriotism. Why? He's just a bit too perfect to be believable.
My second big problem, which is related, is that I don't really understand overt patriotism. Perhaps it's a Brit thing, we aren't very good at all that. We don't do the whole hand on heart, standing in front of the Union Jack. We don't say 'God Bless England' (I'm an atheist so a god ain't blessing anything). As a result I'm afraid I found much of the film, well, a bit cheesy. Like I say, perhaps it's a cultural thing.
And because I wasn't engaged I couldn't suspend my disbelief. It just seemed ridiculous that against the back drop of a World War 2 war zone, no one noticed the man running around with red, white and blue painted shield.
The final layer of cheese is a cameo appearance of Samuel L Jackson who looks like he has just walked straight off the set of the Matrix.
It isn't a badly made film by any stretch and the cast is very good but there just wasn't anything in it for me. I'm giving it 45% and I'm fully anticipating much higher scores from the critics *googles* yep I was right. IMDb has given it 76% and on Rotten Tomatoes it's got 78% from critics and 81% from viewers.
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