Super serious hero films where
everything is dark and gritty and apparently shot with a Nokia 360 torch are
now officially out of fashion. Thank God.
Did anyone really feel the need to explore Batman’s psyche when really
we wanted the see him Batmanning about the place like a rich man with time on
his hands? Was it truly necessary to witness the rise of Superman in
agonisingly dull detail, only for him to simply murder someone?
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| If Hollywood had a naughty step for bad movies, these two would still be sat on it. |
Hell no, the public cried, and as
collective we fed the Marvel machine, giving money hand over fist to bright,
cheerful films about improbable people doing fun things. Massive blockbusters
should be like this – you’ll hear no complaints about the Thor franchise from me – but in the bright lights of these new
franchises spawning across The Avengers universe,
Captain America: Winter Soldier works
as a cautionary tale of where these fun superhero films might begin to fail.
And it’s not because of his
stupid helmet, even though it is incredibly stupid.
It goes something like this: Cappy
discovers that SHIELD, the shadowy, secretive organisation that hosts secret operations
within secret operations, might not be
that moral. Using pre-emptive blanket security measures, SHIELD is now
apparently the NSA with knobs on, with Robert Redford lending a veneer of 70s
conspiracy to a modern story of security over personal liberty. The problem is,
unfortunately, that Captain America himself is just too dull to handle this
kind of intrigue.
Try, if you can, to separate the
old school Hollywood, infinitely charming and delightfully hench Chris Evans
from his character. Cappy is a 1940s piece of propaganda who fought Nazis that
spoke with comedy German accents, and he’s not been allowed room to adapt his
worldview to that of the 21st century. He’s always good and always
makes the right choice, which is perfect for guiding a country through a global
conflict, but not that interesting when you’re watching a film about the grey
area between protection and freedom. Though Chris Evans tries to play within
these boundaries, he’s given very little to work with and the seeds of
development scattered throughout the film are never allowed to grow. Cappy’s
fears that he’s an inadequate leader in a modern world? Dropped. His worries
that he’ll spend life alone? Goes nowhere. Bouncing from one set piece to
another, Cappy doesn’t have what you might call a story arc and this film is
crying out for just a tablespoonful of the dreary character moments which made Man of Steel so long winded. There is a
middle ground between pretention and nonsense, and Winter Soldier didn’t find it.
Or it may have done – it’s hard
to tell since the story is strangely incoherent. The best example of this is
that the Winter Soldier doesn’t make an appearance until about 45 minutes in.
Casting back to The Dark Knight (and
my loathing of Rises is directly
inverted to my love of this film) it was abundantly clear that the Joker would
be the head villain in a story of mob warfare and police overreach because he’s
introduced in the first 5 minutes of the movie. You knew that Batman and the
Joker’s story would take precedence because the Joker had a badass entrance and
a cool soundtrack, and you discovered everything you needed to know about him
through his actions, not because someone sat Batman down and gave a
chronological history of his skills and experience.
Fun fact: the academic name for a villain is the Agent of Destruction, and
as far as I know that isn't already a registered character name.
You would be forgiven for thinking that Captain America: The Winter Soldier would
have a similar arc, since their names are right up there in the title. Nope – the
Winter Soldier comes in, blows up a car and breezes out, leaving Scarlet
Johannsson to tell everyone who he is and what his ideal date would be. It
pushes it over the edge of silliness to incompetence and it’s frustrating to
see this much talent go to waste.
On the positive side, Evans and
Johannsson are as watchable as they are impossibly beautiful, the action is
well paced and it does have a lot of humour about itself (Cappy’s list of
things to do is quite funny) and there were even moments which were quite
moving (Steve Rogers talking to ‘his best girl’ had me reaching for a hanky)
but it’s nowhere near the standards that Marvel has set for itself. There was
too much going on and not enough of it about the two title characters; too many
explorations into a character’s mind makes a film unwatchable, too little makes
our heroes unknowable. Come on guys, this should be easy by now.
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