Movie Review: Captain America: The First Avenger

           Captain America suffers from what seems like an increasingly common trend in Hollywood. I’m talking about “setupitus” (pronounced “set-up-i-tus”), in which part/parcel of a film’s raison d’etre is to serve as a set-up for a larger series. C.A. is, in undeniable part, a set-up for the upcoming Avengers films. The/my problem with setupitus is that it can encourage a certain laziness on the part of a film’s makers, a certain reticence to tell the very best story they can possibly tell with the material they have to work with, which bothers yours truly when he’s just forked over like 25 bucks to watch the telling of said story.

Now, I’m not saying that setupitus is the only thing that prevented C.A. from being a better than merely decent super-hero movie, however, I couldn’t help but feel that setupitus contributed something to the film’s inadequacies. For example, the rag-tag squad of guys The Captain frees from prison, what the hell were any of their names? Or, when the Captain’s very, very best friend Bucky died (spoiler), who really cared (might we care later?!?)? The only things yours truly actually cared about in the film were (1) the super-awesome looking blue-cube that Red Skull used to build his army of Hydra, which, it turns out, is part/parcel to the Iron Man story, and (2) the romance between The Captain and Agent Carter (Haley Atwell), which the filmmakers spent a significant portion of screen-time building the significance of only to have the Cap’n crash Red Skull’s airplane into a snow-bank and leave us going, “Uh, what about agent Carter?”, which I suppose the film-makers thought was adequately addressed with Cap’s “I was supposed to go dancing...”

           Anyways, Captain America: the First Avenger wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t all that good: I wouldn’t pay any of my hard-earned money to see it again on the big screen; I wouldn’t Red Box, Net Flix, or On Demand it; and I wouldn’t sit my arse down to watch much of it if it happened to be on the old tube in like five years or whenever (but I also wouldn’t be like, “Oh God! Turn that crap off!!!”). That said, I can’t wait to see the upcoming Avengers movie! That’ll be awesome!!!