Review: Captain America - the First Avenger

Captain America - the First Avenger

Starring

Chris Evans as Steve Rogers - Tommy Lee Jones as Colonel Chester Phillips,
Hugo Weaving as Johann Schmidt - Hayley Atwell as Peggy Carter
Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes - Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark
Neal McDonough as Dum Dum Dugan - Derek Luke as Gabe Jones
Stanley Tucci as Abraham Erskine - Kenneth Choi as Jim Morita
Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury

Running time 124 minutes

I think that anyone who is even remotely familiar with Captain America knows the origins of shield toting action hero. So I shan’t spend too much time on the obvious.

During the height of WWII Steve Rogers desperately wants to enlist, however being ill most of his life, is classified 4f while his pal Bucky has already received his deployment papers. In desperation Steve accept the offer of a German scientist to test a serum to create what is hoped will be a super soldier.

Just as the experiment seems to have succeeded a saboteur blows up the lab and kills the scientist who created the serum. Rogers catches the saboteur but without a program to create more soldiers and since the formula was lost in the explosion, Rogers hopes of becoming a soldier is dashed.

Through various machinations he finds himself in the USO and finally in Europe and finally embroiled in a rescue and a final mission to save the world.

I know I have really trimmed this movie down to a bare minimum but so much is based on the surprise reveal that if you haven’t seen the movie yet, I would hate to ruin it. Needless to say we watch Captain America slow evolve into what we remember his as. Chris Evans really grabs hold of the Steve Rogers persona. You never doubt for a minute that he is the Captain. The action is often cartoonish or better comic-bookish, but doing it straight and not camping the action or the characterizations makes it so much easier to suspend belief. We have seen so many done just for the payday lately, Captain America is certainly a breath of fresh air.

Its the extras that have me baffled! I rented the blu-ray under the impression that everything would be better. Not true! I received the DVD version of the same movie and it was loaded up! Everything I would want in a disk. Director comments, shorts on making of the costume and others, while the blu-ray gave me bupkiss. Very disappointing but if you are just renting for the movie blu-ray is fine but if you want the works, consider dvd.

So counting the dvd and blu ray together the overall movie would get a solid 8, either way plenty watchable. Can’t speak to the 3d, but even without it’s fine.