about Maverick 管家仔囉哩叭唆

Directed by: Joe Johnston
Cast: Chris Evans (Steve Rogers/Captain America), Hayley Atwell (Peggy Carter), Hugo Weaving (Red Skull)

As true-blue as its pure-hearted hero, Captain America is a film out of time – a modern Marvel blockbuster with an authentic Saturday matinee soul. Maybe it’s the fact that director Joe Johnston served an apprenticeship in the house of Lucas and Spielberg (he storyboarded the matchless truck chase in Raiders Of The Lost Ark, and there’s a drop of that film’s bloodline in Cap’s occult-plundering Nazis and tangible, two-fisted action sequences). Or perhaps it’s the period setting – as invigorating a twist for the Marvel canon as Thor’s other-dimensional realms – that allows Johnston to expel the moral ambiguities and tainted patriotism of the 21^st Century and revel in a clear-eyed, sepia-tinted idealism that’s as far from the smart-ass zing of Iron Man as it’s possible to imagine.

Johnston clearly relishes his Roosevelt era playground. One of the film’s more soaringly larkish moments finds Captain America employed as shameless propaganda tool – “The star-spangled man with the plan” – awkwardly fronting an all-singin’, all-dancin’ musical revue number. It’s a bravura sequence that also homages the character’s birth in Timely Comics and cliffhanger serials. Elsewhere Johnston captures the spirit of the classic war movie, echoing The Dirty Dozen and Where Eagles Dare as Cap and the commandos face down the gimp-goons of HYDRA, Hitler’s tech-fetishising “deep science division”.

Hurling us from Blitz-ruined London to the alpine fortress of the Red Skull (a teutonically sinister turn by Hugo Weaving, in pursuit of a cosmic MacGuffin first glimpsed in Thor), filled with moments as tiny as the face of the girl you love in a locket and as huge as a monstrously-winged orbital bomber on course to devastate Manhattan, Captain America is a medal-worthy joy.