Captain America reviewed - part filmed in Manc and the 'Pool
Jonathan Schofield thinks Marvel Comics should be stopped licensing their products by law
How many more Marvel Comics are there to wade through?
How many more loser turned hero characters are there hidden in the shallow pages of their graphic novels for movie companies to get Tommy Lee Jones to act in?
But it did make it easy, so here we are, drowning in a sea of films with multiple explosions and the emotional pull of a deflated phallus-shaped hen-party balloon in a wet Sunday morning gutter.
Captain America is more of the same, more ploughing of the barren Marvel Comic field, all made worse by terrible casting for the main character, and a plot which so closely resembles Raiders of the Lost Ark, it should be given an Oscar for cheekiness.
Back to 'Our Hero' who is so wooden you can almost see the grain. The big problem is that he’s so completely un-tough that selling marshmallows would be deemed unreasonably macho for him – and this after he’s had the serum given to him that boosts Charles Atlas-like his puny torso into something only actors or men with very small brains can ever be bothered achieving.
Skip America’s folksy name in the film, away from the heroics, is Steve Rogers, which could be the first words of a very rude sentence. In his case the third word would be ‘sheep’.
Roger’s real name is Chris Evans. This is gratifying, because it marries him with a ginger-haired DJ turned One Show presenter who is in every way the utter antithesis of a superhero, unless Marvel Comics has invented a superhero called Colonel Smug.
Atwell tells Chris Evans he shares a name with a One Show presenter
Meanwhile the film has the big stars acting by numbers, as though not sure which superhero film they’re in, just knowing that it’s worth several more trips to Cannes and a third home in the Hamptons. So we have the aforesaid Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Samuel L Jackson, Stanley Tucci, Richard Armitage ad infinitum.
Aside from Tucci - who acts with at least a memory of the verve that made him respected - they’re all piss-poor.
Hugo Weaving, Nasty Nazi, wonders which Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-off he's in
Still there’s one character that you can’t keep your eyes off.
And surprise, surprise, it's a woman.
According to the Law of Marvel, women are a tea and biscuits mumsy interruption in a teenager’s Call of Duty blow ‘em up moment. Or maybe they flash past, all thighs and breasts, for a snog at the end.
But here we have Hayley Atwell, with her cool English appeal. Folks she should be the superhero. She’s certainly a fantasy figure. She bosses the screen in ways that Steve ‘DJ Chris Evans’ Rogers doesn’t approach with his drippy features and his ridiculous shield - the worst boy racer’s hubcap ever.
As soon as Atwell came on the screen I regretted not going to watch the movie in 3D. That pale skin, those scarlet lips, those British woollen service uniforms from the 1940s, that limpid enunciation, the clear, calm, brainpower, the attempt to act....thank God Captain America keeps being late for her.
Maybe in some graphic novel future world her superpowers and mine (as yet latent ones) will meld in a cross-dimensional, time-flitting, globe saving clinch. (Ok there's a certain contradiction between these paragraphs and the earlier ones about Marvel's attitude to women.)
Still Atwell should be the main character. The film should be called Queen Britannia, not Captain America.
Bad acting, and a single good actress aside, Manchester is a fine Big Apple – a large slice of the film was acted out on Dale Street in the city. Even Liverpool gets in the picture with a brief dockland chase. The north west makes for a convincing Brooklyn, but that’s natural, given that New York nicked the cotton warehouse and dock building techniques of those cities to help form its own architecture.
Brooklyn In Manchester, Thanks To Flickr's Fly-Sycamore
As for the movie, as for Marvel, the whole Captain America collation is a odorous pile of nonsense. Captain America makes even the most pointless Bond movies of the Roger Moore era look like timeless classics.
But it does the graphic novel it came from justice.
It proves that despite what the apologists of graphic novels and manga say, such works are for people who can’t be arsed reading a proper book because it would tax their brains with bigger more complex narratives than ones which depend upon violence and special effects to chug things along. It proves that they're comics for teenagers - and they know cleverly that even the most grown-up of us like to revert back to the acne-years from time to time.
Go to Captain America for Atwell, nothing else.
Rating 1/10
Captain America is on general release.
Captain America And The Stolen Boy Racer Hubcap
How many more loser turned hero characters are there hidden in the shallow pages of their graphic novels for movie companies to get Tommy Lee Jones to act in?
Captain America makes even the most pointless Bond movies of the Roger Moore era look like timeless classics.If our lovely digital age hadn't made special effects so easy then possibly we'd have been saved the endless blither of ridiculous Marvel comic offshoots.
But it did make it easy, so here we are, drowning in a sea of films with multiple explosions and the emotional pull of a deflated phallus-shaped hen-party balloon in a wet Sunday morning gutter.
Captain America is more of the same, more ploughing of the barren Marvel Comic field, all made worse by terrible casting for the main character, and a plot which so closely resembles Raiders of the Lost Ark, it should be given an Oscar for cheekiness.
Back to 'Our Hero' who is so wooden you can almost see the grain. The big problem is that he’s so completely un-tough that selling marshmallows would be deemed unreasonably macho for him – and this after he’s had the serum given to him that boosts Charles Atlas-like his puny torso into something only actors or men with very small brains can ever be bothered achieving.
Skip America’s folksy name in the film, away from the heroics, is Steve Rogers, which could be the first words of a very rude sentence. In his case the third word would be ‘sheep’.
Roger’s real name is Chris Evans. This is gratifying, because it marries him with a ginger-haired DJ turned One Show presenter who is in every way the utter antithesis of a superhero, unless Marvel Comics has invented a superhero called Colonel Smug.
Atwell tells Chris Evans he shares a name with a One Show presenterMeanwhile the film has the big stars acting by numbers, as though not sure which superhero film they’re in, just knowing that it’s worth several more trips to Cannes and a third home in the Hamptons. So we have the aforesaid Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Samuel L Jackson, Stanley Tucci, Richard Armitage ad infinitum.
Aside from Tucci - who acts with at least a memory of the verve that made him respected - they’re all piss-poor.
Hugo Weaving, Nasty Nazi, wonders which Raiders of the Lost Ark rip-off he's inStill there’s one character that you can’t keep your eyes off.
And surprise, surprise, it's a woman.
According to the Law of Marvel, women are a tea and biscuits mumsy interruption in a teenager’s Call of Duty blow ‘em up moment. Or maybe they flash past, all thighs and breasts, for a snog at the end.
But here we have Hayley Atwell, with her cool English appeal. Folks she should be the superhero. She’s certainly a fantasy figure. She bosses the screen in ways that Steve ‘DJ Chris Evans’ Rogers doesn’t approach with his drippy features and his ridiculous shield - the worst boy racer’s hubcap ever.
As soon as Atwell came on the screen I regretted not going to watch the movie in 3D. That pale skin, those scarlet lips, those British woollen service uniforms from the 1940s, that limpid enunciation, the clear, calm, brainpower, the attempt to act....thank God Captain America keeps being late for her.
Maybe in some graphic novel future world her superpowers and mine (as yet latent ones) will meld in a cross-dimensional, time-flitting, globe saving clinch. (Ok there's a certain contradiction between these paragraphs and the earlier ones about Marvel's attitude to women.)
Still Atwell should be the main character. The film should be called Queen Britannia, not Captain America.
Bad acting, and a single good actress aside, Manchester is a fine Big Apple – a large slice of the film was acted out on Dale Street in the city. Even Liverpool gets in the picture with a brief dockland chase. The north west makes for a convincing Brooklyn, but that’s natural, given that New York nicked the cotton warehouse and dock building techniques of those cities to help form its own architecture.
Brooklyn In Manchester, Thanks To Flickr's Fly-SycamoreAs for the movie, as for Marvel, the whole Captain America collation is a odorous pile of nonsense. Captain America makes even the most pointless Bond movies of the Roger Moore era look like timeless classics.
But it does the graphic novel it came from justice.
It proves that despite what the apologists of graphic novels and manga say, such works are for people who can’t be arsed reading a proper book because it would tax their brains with bigger more complex narratives than ones which depend upon violence and special effects to chug things along. It proves that they're comics for teenagers - and they know cleverly that even the most grown-up of us like to revert back to the acne-years from time to time.
Go to Captain America for Atwell, nothing else.
Rating 1/10
Captain America is on general release.
Captain America And The Stolen Boy Racer Hubcap
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