REVIEW: Captain America: The First Avenger

21 07 2011

The bookend of a four comic book/superhero summer, “Captain America: The First Avenger” was given the onerous responsibility to keep audiences from succumbing to genre fatigue.  Luckily, it’s one of the better of these four – but that’s not saying much given this summer.  Joe Johnston’s take on the classic character actually gets some of the basics right, having the narrative storyline that “Thor” lacked and the decent visuals that “Green Lantern” didn’t bother to have.

But just because it’s an improvement doesn’t necessarily means it good, especially taking into account how poor the aforementioned movies were.  “Captain America” is barely bearable, so middling and nondescript that you can’t help but wonder how smashing “The Avengers” could possibly be with all these sub-par buildup movies.  If it’s lucky, it will be equal to the sum of its parts – and Chris Evans and company do about as little to fix the existing Marvel deficit as the President and Congress are doing to fix our national deficit.

Evans has remarkably little charisma despite being devilishly (albeit guiltily) entertaining in the “Fantastic Four” series, neither as a CGI-enhanced shrimp nor as a P90X-enhanced “Men’s Health” cover model prototype.  Playing Steve Rogers, selected to become the superhuman Captain America thanks to his tenacity in the face of bullying, he never really gives us a reason to get invested in the movie – something crucial for a lackluster summer blockbuster in need of some distinguishing feature.  He hits one note the whole movie: dull.  At least in most action movies, the main guy seems to be enjoying kicking butt … and Captain America gets to fight Nazis in World War II!  What more could an action hero ask for?!

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REVIEW: The Wolfman

5 08 2010

Joe Johnston’s “The Wolfman” is a remake of the 1940s original, yet it winds up making you nostalgic for a completely different decade.  Strangely enough, it most resembles the 1980s.  Benicio Del Toro in his werewolf makeup looks like he walked straight off the set of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video and somehow wound up in 1890s England.  Weird…

The movie tells the same story we have seen countless times with all sorts of predatory creatures, although it’s typically werewolves and vampires.  Some sort of flesh contact is made with the creatures, a normal person is transformed into one of them, and they subsequently find themselves living on the outskirts of society.  In fact, we just recently saw Neil Blompkamp use this formula and apply it to aliens in “District 9,” and he created something that felt refreshingly original.  Here, it’s just same old, same old.

In fact, the only thing that Joe Johnston does to add some flavor to the tired story is to amp up the violence and gore.  “The Wolfman” bears an R rating and uses that level of freedom to go hog wild on the blood.  There’s all sorts of decapitations and ripping of limbs in the movie, almost to the point where it becomes overkill.  One has to wonder if Johnston turned over the reins to some violent video-game loving teenager for these sequences.

I can’t think of the last time where I actually thought that a movie’s special effects were bad, but they certainly are here.  Blame poor planning and poor execution on the filmmakers’ part.  And there’s absolutely no relief from the hackneyed story, not even from a pair of Oscar winners, Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins.  Never has the latter been so far away from his “The Silence of the Lambs” glory days.  If he doesn’t start picking better movies, I’m going to have to hold a moment of silence for his career.

And still, I just can’t get over that wolf makeup because it’s just absolutely horrific.  I find it so hard to believe that it’s the work of renowned Oscar winner Rick Baker, not some mom for a high school play.  Watching Del Toro’s wolfman fight civilians just made me chuckle; watching him fight another werewolf was as funny as any comedy this year.  The suspenseful, climactic battle scene just feels like a dreadful”Scary Movie” parody of the wretched “Twilight” series.  D /


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