PodBill
Just what I expected
Borgarkeri
A bit overrated, but still an amazing film
Glatpoti
It is so daring, it is so ambitious, it is so thrilling and weird and pointed and powerful. I never knew where it was going.
Portia Hilton
Blistering performances.
bensonmum2
During WWII, a brave, patriotic young man undergoes a series of painful experiments that turn him into a super-human. He takes the persona of red, white, and blue wearing Captain America and heads to Nazi Germany to do battle with a character known as Red Skull. Red Skull is a similarly enhanced man. Captain America loses the battle and ends up frozen in ice in the wilds of Alaska. Fifty or so year later, Caps body is found. After he's un-thawed and regains his senses, he discovers that his old foe, Red Skull, has taken a secret identity, but is still up to his old tricks. His latest plot involves kidnapping the President of the United States so he can implant a controlling device in his head. Cap will once again try to stop Red Skull.While not a total disaster, the 1990 version of Captain America isn't what I'd call a "good" movie. My main problem is with the script. It's what I'd call lazy. There is no logic behind much of what happens on-screen. I'm going to limit this to two or three examples of what I'm talking about. Otherwise, this could go on forever. First, Cap is thawed in Alaska. As he's walking through Canada, a reporter from Washington, driving a pick-up truck, just happens to be in the right place at the right time and almost literally runs in to Cap. Yeah, sure. To stretch believablity even further, a gang of baddies from Italy, who are also searching for Captain America, miraculously discover his whereabouts at almost the exact same moment. What are the odds that these people would find a lone man on foot in the wilds of Canada at the same time? It's just stupid. The second example of poor, lazy writing and a lack of logic involves the "crew" Red Skull sends to take out Captain America. You'd think that a real bad dude like Red Skull would have an army of henchmen at his disposal. But for some bizarre reason, he doesn't. Instead, he sends his 20-something daughter, her model friends, and their boyfriends to deal with his mortal enemy. I can't think of a less threatening looking group of supposed killers.For my third example, I'll mention the aftermath of the Preident's kidnapping. Captain America and his little girlfriend are looking for the President, but they appear to be alone. Where in the world is the Secret Service? Where are the Italian police? Where is the military? If the Preident of the USA were to actually be kidnapped, almost everything in the entire world would come to a complete halt. Instead, things in Italy, where the President was kidnapped, seem to be going on as if nothing happened. Not very likely and, again, stupid.Add these problems I have with this dog of script to some pretty bad acting, poor special effects, a mind-numbingly ineffectual Captain America, and lame fight choreography and you've got a bad movie on your hands. While I did enjoy bits and pieces of the film, the whole is so bad I cannot give Captian America a positive rating.
Eric Stevenson
I realize that almost all of the bad superhero movies I've seen ("Catwoman", "Steel") were all based on DC properties. I knew I simply had to watch this movie if only because it's the lowest rated film based on a Marvel comic on this entire website. I think my old worst Marvel movie was "Daredevil" and this is easily worse. At least it's a step up from "Killer Tomatoes Eat France!". There are simply so many things wrong with this movie and I am so glad they made a good movie with "Captain America: The First Avenger". While that personally isn't one of my favorite Marvel movies, it's great to compare the two and how the new one is so much better.This one makes the mistake of having a third of it set in World War II, instead of the whole movie. This was set up much better in the recent movie. The special effects are quite poor, with Captain America's shield looking like a giant Frisbee. They couldn't even get the Red Skull right. He has a nose in this movie for some reason, even though it's obvious skulls don't have full noses. He didn't have ears, so why did they get that right but not his nose? There's a scene where Captain America grabs him and the Red Skull cuts off his own hand. Why not just cut Captain America's hand off? The Captain himself is weak and a jerk in this movie. He steals a good guy's car and just leaves him alone on the road! Later, he steals another car. He's easily beaten by the Red Skull when he first appears. This is one pathetic superhero. The Red Skull even forgets that he read a newspaper that the Captain was frozen for decades! He spends most of this movie not even as a skull. They could have at least said he wore a mask instead of some insane plastic surgery. The movie goes on too long and its climax is boring. The Captain was supposed to have polio before the experiment, but he's a perfectly capable tall human being before! This fails on all levels and I have never seen a great comic book company go so low. There's a reason superhero movies are so popular nowadays. They're actually good! *1/2
RobTheConqueror
I.....I.....what the hell have I watched? I don't know what to say. It's astonishing given Marvel's current booming success with the MCU that back in the 80's and 90's all they managed to toss out was dross like Howard The Duck and......this thing.For a start, Captain America's origin story is made significantly less interesting and more generic, and what we get is a boring character with no development or personality. It's basically Loki's impersonation of him in Thor: The Dark World, but put on the big screen for nearly two hours.And the movie as a whole is corny, boring and just dodgily written, with the WWII setting being rushed and replaced with the present day very quickly in. And not to mention that they give Cap the characteristic of.....stealing cars.One thing I do appreciate is that they do try to make Red Skull a more interesting character, but ultimately that's wasted as we don't get any mention of his backstory until the very end, when Cap uses it to distract him before LITERALLY MURDERING HIM, and he's only the freaking Red Skull for about 5 fricking minutes! Seriously.So, all in all, trash. And coming out a year after Tim Burton's Batman, it seems all the more insulting.
utgard14
During WWII, Steve Rogers (Matt Salinger) volunteers for a government experiment to become the ultimate super solider, Captain America, and finds himself facing the evil Red Skull (Scott Paulin). After stopping a missile launched at the White House, Rogers is frozen in ice for fifty years. When he's thawed out, he discovers the Red Skull is still around and causing trouble, although now part of a conspiracy involving mafia and military industrialist types who want to stop the President because he's an environmentalist. Oh, brother! This is the kind of crap comic book movies used to be, with a few notable exceptions. It's directed by schlockmeister Albert Pyun, probably best remembered today for the Jean-Claude Van Damme "classic" Cyborg. Pyun made a lot of low-budget garbage over the years. You can count on one hand the number of times he made something approaching good. And I'm talking about a hand with several fingers missing. Anyway, Pyun directs this with his usual lack of talent. The cast is poor, led by wooden Matt Salinger (son of author J.D. Salinger) who has the unfortunate duty of trying to act while dressed up in a costume that appears to be made of rubber, complete with padding and fake abs. Scott Paulin plays the Red Skull (an Italian fascist here instead of a German Nazi, for some bizarre reason). He treats the role as camp and plays it up as the joke that it is. His accent is a mix of Super Mario and the Count from Sesame Street. The Red Skull's mask is slightly less embarrassing than Captain America's costume but only because it looks like something left over from a horror movie rather than something true to the source material. He spends a large amount of the movie without the Skull mask because he had plastic surgery to hide who he is. He still looks grotesque and I found it hard to believe he could fool anybody looking like that. The rest of the cast includes familiar faces like Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox, Darren McGavin, and Michael Nouri. McGavin and Nouri both use hammy Texas accents because they're generals and all cornball movie generals sound the sameThis stinks, plain and simple. Several times in the movie Captain America, our big hero, uses the "feets don't fail me now" approach to battle. In other words, he runs away like a scared little girl. The action scenes are unexciting. The script was written by someone recovering from brain surgery. The direction and editing are inept. The music score is forgettably generic. The whole production is laughably cheap. It does have camp value and some appeal as a curiosity for comic book fans who might want to see how far we've come. Just prepare yourself for the awfulness.