Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

30 guys with modern laser guns face 30 guys with 1940s rifles in the middle of the German forest. In a sinch, the guys with the rifles knock down the guys with the lasers. Why? Because they are the Allied forces, and can’t lose, even though the germans have a sci-fi armament. “Captain America: The First Avenger”, is the last desperate attempt of Marvel studios to get a film out there before the eagerly anticipated “The Avengers” in 2012. Last year, reviewing “Iron Man 2” I wrote “…the movie's only point is to promote the 2012 movie "The Avengers", which will be a league of super heroes, Iron Man included, leaded by L. Jackson (…) And if they wanted to promote "The Avengers", well, buy a billboard, don't make a movie!”. After seeing another not that good a Marvel movie, all I have to say is: Marvel, ‘Avengers’ better be a hell of a movie. That better be the freakin’ best comic-book hero film adaptation I will ever see in my lifetime, because for the last 4 or 5 years you have been producing film after film with little to offer, but promising a lot at the end, and saying to people ‘well, this was just the build up for the real thing, and the real thing is the Avengers movie next year’. To put it simply, Captain America (Chris Evans) is a puny Brooklyn nobody who due to a secret experiment gets superhuman strength. Aided by their very own Q (Iron Man’s father Howard Stark), and a lot of gadgets, Captain America leads the Allied soldiers deep into Europe, where they face Nazi dissidents lead by Hugo Weaving (the villain Red Skull), who has the same powers as Captain America. But he has one more thing. He goes to Norway or whatever at the beginning of the movie and finds a God-like artifact which allows him to have laser guns and whatnots. There are other things (unimportant ones), like a great performance by Tommy Lee Jones, but that’s beside the point. The movie consists of 1h of fill-up how-Captain-America-became-Captain-America, and then a second hour which consists of a bunch of disloyal fights. Captain America kicks everybody’s butt because, well, he has superhuman strength. All the Allied forces kick the Nazis’ butt, because everyone knows that bullets are more effective than lasers. And finally, (spoiler alert… but who cares!), when Captain America finally has a worthy opponent, a villain with the same powers, he doesn’t even have to fight for Red Skull to die. Skull dies victim of something else (a stupid thing by the way). I saw the movie with a comic book specialist and he carefully pointed out to me the various nods to the fans, and explained how well the movie reproduced these elements. So I guess that for a connoisseur (not my case) it will have some interesting features. But he also agreed with me in saying that in isolation this movie has little to offer. Fight scenes, explosions, one or other amusing one-liner (Lee Jones’ “I will not kiss you!”), but all in all, mindless entertainment, a disappointing tradition from Marvel Studios, especially in the movies related to “The Avengers”, which appear to be made in such a hurry, that the mere process of filmmaking seems to be forgotten. So, again I repeat: “The Avengers” better be the best comic-book film I will ever see, or else all these movies are pointless. Oh, almost forgot, and what about those Alô-Alô german accents?!