Captain America (1990)

So I’ve always known about this movie.  I was still going to the comic shop weekly around the time it came out even though I wasn’t getting any superhero books anymore.  So I heard about it & there was a lot of speculation that it might actually be good after Tim Burton’s Batman (& to me personally the Dolph Lundgren version of The Punisher) had been fairly well received.  But it ended up direct to video (never a good sign) & even my brother who likes movies gave it a pretty negative review.  Not to mention the fact that I always thought of Captain America as a goody two shoes hero anyway.  A few years later while working at a video store I walked by the box every day & never even bothered to pick it up & look at it.

In 2006 I saw the Ultimate Avengers cartoon movie & I was blown away by the opening sequence with Captain America crashing a plane on the beach at Normandy & flying out of the windshield to start beating the crap out of people & I gained a new found respect for the character.  Then I got a collection of the first 25 issues of the Avengers & gained even more respect for the character where he’s a quasi-suicidal hero without any super powers needing to get bailed out by actual superheroes each issue.  In 2011 with the new Captain America movie coming out (which I still haven’t seen) there was a lot of buzz & nostalgia for this in geek culture.  So I finally checked it out.  The opening fifteen minutes isn’t good, but better than I expected.  Everything seems about at the level of the stuff that direct to video studios like Full Moon were putting out at the time.  Then it starts to get worse.  I feel like half the cast is from A Christmas Story & that nothing after Captain America emerges in modern times is connected to Captain America more than a generic spy character & he is semi-incompetent as a superhero.  I don’t even know what I want in a Captain America movie to be honest & I guess all I know about the character is what he was up to in the 1960s & the 1980s so I’m not a scholar on the whole thing, but I know what I don’t want is this.  Even multi-tasking by drawing a comic while watching it felt like a waste of my time.