Captain America: Civil War

With massive tentpole movies locked into extremely specific release dates way ahead of their actual releases, 2016 was always going to be the Summer of Superheroes Twatting Other Superheroes: ‘Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice’, ‘Captain America: Civil War’, ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’. Hell, let’s call it Summer of the Semi-Colon by way of an alias.

‘B vs S’ was first out of the traps and got the kind of critical drubbing last seen aimed at ‘The Lone Ranger’ (and like that movie, ‘B vs S’ – while no classic – turned out better than anyone gave it credit for), and ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’, which opens in the UK tomorrow, is already being submerged by a wave of negative reviews.

‘Captain America: Civil War’ was always going to emerge victorious. Unlike the rushed attempt to springboard a two-part Justice League movie after just ‘Man of Steel’ and ‘B vs S’, and unlike the all-of-the-place quality control of the ‘X-Men’ franchise and the narrative shell-game of the timelines (Deadpool’s piss-taking line in his own magnificently meta solo movie is a spot-on bit of parody), Marvel have developed their stable of icons and villains over a decade and a dozen movies. Nothing in ‘Civil War’ feels rushed or shoe-horned in. The MCU’s timelines and nexus points have been so carefully mapped out that ‘Civil War’ variously functions as: the conclusion to the Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes arc that links ‘The First Avenger’ and ‘Winter Soldier’; a de facto ‘Age of Ultron’ sequel (only sans Hulk and Thor); a passing on of the baton from Peggy Carter to Sharon Carter (a.k.a. Agent 13 – and kudos to all concerned for giving Emily Vancamp more to do this time round); ‘Iron Man 4: Let’s Give Tony Stark’s Ego Another Kicking’; a showreel for ‘Black Panther’; and a teaser trailer for ‘Spider-Man: Hey, Kids, We’ve Got the Rights Back and This Time it Won’t be an Andrew Garfield Suck-Fest, Honest’.

In other words, there’s a lot going on in ‘Civil War’. The opening mini-movie (redolent of a James Bond pre-credits adventure) has the team intercepting some desperados out to get their filthy paws on a biological weapon. One of these desperados is Crossbones (Frank Grillo), Cap (Chris Evans)’s second division nemesis from ‘Winter Soldier’, and he almost gets the drop on our square-jawed hero. Enter Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who takes care of business but at the cost of an entire building and some civilian casualties.

This debacle coming so soon after the city-wide destruction of ‘Age of Ultron’, the Avengers are hauled up before a committee (making ‘Civil War’ the second major superhero movie, after ‘B vs S’, to steal a plot point from ‘The Incredibles’) and it is impressed upon them that if they want to continue saving the world, they’d better agree to some checks and measure PDQ. Because nothing says “thank you for saving the world” more than grey-suited bureaucracy.

At this point, ‘Civil War’ makes the first of a couple of wobbles – neither are franchise-disruptingly serious, but they’re still annoying. Cap’s reticence to accede to the whims of politicians is understandable given the political conspiracy shenanigans he got caught up in the middle of in ‘Winter Soldier’. However, Stark (Robert Downey Jnr)’s volte face from supremely arrogant twat who was basically the architect of everything bad that happened in ‘Age of Ultron’ to bleeding-heart/survivor’s-guilt-orphan-boy/ascendee-to-moral-high-ground comes off as a character arc too far; it’s founded on just one scene – and no matter how good Alfre Woodward is as the voice of conscience, I just don’t buy Stark’s tunnel-vision Messianic certainty crumbling based on just this one encounter. Indeed, something happens to War Machine (Don Cheadle) late in the game that, if the scripters had found a way to stage it at the outset, would have pushed Stark down the required narrative avenue a lot of convincingly.

The fact remains, though, that this is ‘Cap vs Iron Man’ and the conflict needed to be established pretty quickly. It’s compounded, effectively enough, by a bombing that disrupts the signing of the accord and for which one B. Barnes Esq is in the frame. Only Cap won’t give up on his old buddy and goes rogue in order to find out the truth of the matter. This section, Cap teaming up with Sharon Carter (and a potential romance simmering away), while one B. Panther Esq (the effortlessly charismatic Chadwick Boseman – bring on the guy’s solo movie) stalks Bucky, is easily the best part of the film.

Soon enough, though, loyalties are tested and sides are taken and it’s time for the big airport smackdown – and ‘Civil War’ takes its second wobble. The sequence is a grandslam piece of showboating which is (a) utterly devoid of narrative tension – after all, Helmut Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) has been plotting away in the background so it’s no surprise that Bucky will turn out to be innocent(ish) and the revelations about the real villain of the piece reserved for the final act; and (b) simply too top heavy. If ‘Civil War’ is one green monster from the id and one Nordic god short of being an actual Avengers film, then it overcompensates for their absence by throwing everyone else into the mix. When the warring factions square off against each for fifteen minutes of action, a few sardonically humorous character beats and about a gazillion dollars of special effects, the viewer is presented with – on screen at the same time – Captain America, Iron Man, Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson, shockingly short-changed by the script), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Vision (Paul Bettany), Scarlet Witch, War Machine, Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Ant Man (Paul Rudd), Spider-Man (Tom Holland), Bucky Barnes and Black Panther. That’s twelve iconic characters having a brawl. For fifteen minutes. During which Ant Man makes buses and planes and even himself very small and/or very big. For the most part, the scene is fast, frothy and funny (“are we still friends?” as former partners trade punches; Spider-Man being reminded that fighting doesn’t usually involve so much talk), but it never escapes the fact that it’s so top-heavy the bottom of the screen practically screams for an RSJ to shore it up.

Thankfully, the film continues for another half hour and gets its groove back on (mostly: there’s one horrible moment that’s written in purely to stoke up Stark’s hatred for Bucky, and the way it’s incorporated sucks donkey balls), moving towards a finale that doesn’t actually require entire postcode areas to get blown up or mansion-sized gunships drop from the sky.

As ‘Winter Soldier’ debated the legitimacy of control, ‘Civil War’ questions what happens with it. The script stacks things in a certain someone’s favour, and does so in such a way as to absolve them of any and all thorny j’accuses. There’s a similar sense of cop-out as regards the politics of piece, which don’t make a lot of sense when you subject them to even the slightest critical scrutiny. Nonetheless, when it does work, it works brilliantly. Its best moments are, by turns, exciting, flamboyant and intense. ‘Civil War’ is, like the previous Captain America films, a superhero movie that’s actually about something; and it gets to play around with big themes without hunkering down in a mire of crushing joylessness a la ‘B vs S’.

The thorn in its side – arguably the thorn in every other superhero movie’s side – is ‘Deadpool’. In a way that no example of its ilk has done in recent years (bar, notably, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’), ‘Deadpool’ allowed the superhero movie to be fun: big, dumb, adult-orientated fun. How the next slate of Marvel offerings shape up remains to be seen, likewise whether ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ is as bad as early reviews suggest. But it could be that ‘Deadpool’ was either the death knell or the wake up call for the superhero genre. They say that a week is a long time in politics, and we’ve still got a ways to go until ‘The Infinity Wars’.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

At the end of Joe Johnston’s ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’, the newly revivified Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) finds himself in the middle of a bustling, neon-soaked metropolis. The world has moved on by six decades. No dialogue is necessary; it’s there on his face: I fought for this? Joss Whedon’s ‘The Avengers’ gives him no time for navel-gazing: Loki and the Chitauri’s threat is immediate and perilous enough that the team are thrown together with little time for formalities.

As Anthony and Joe Russo’s ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ opens, Rogers’s integration into the twenty-first century has progressed somewhat, up to the point of male bonding with soldier-turned-counsellor Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie). Then, kicking the action off in fine style, Natasha Romanoff a.k.a. the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) turns up and SHIELD swing into action to rescue the hostage crew of a security vessel from a cut-throat group of terrorists. Said mission is accomplished, but Rogers discovers that Romanoff – acting on orders from Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) not disseminated to the rest of the team – had entirely different mission perameters.

Rogers has it out with Fury, who bluntly appraises him of how much the world has changed since the war. Fury shows Rogers the next stage in SHIELD’s counter-terrorism mandate: three heavily armoured heli-carriers triangulated by a surveillance satellite, capable of identifying and neutralising a threat before it happens, a project Fury is urging SHIELD Secretary Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) to push through. 

Rogers is aghast at the implications and begins to question his role in SHIELD. Nostalgia in the form of a Smithsonian tribute to his 1940s incarnation tugs at him. A hospital visit to nonagenarian Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), now revealed as one of the founders of SHIELD, leaves him feeling even more at odds with his new life. Then an attempt is made on Nick Fury’s life by a heavily armed team lead by a notorious Russian assassin known only as the Winter Soldier and long thought to be a myth. Realising he’s been set-up, and with a fair few secrets of his own, Fury turns up at Rogers’s apartment but before he can impart any pertinent information, the assassin strikes again.

Factions within SHIELD move against Rogers. He finds himself on the run, with only the Black Widow and Wilson on his side. (Wilson, just in case anyone doesn’t know, later becomes Falcon; Mackie embraces the role with relish.) The mid-section of ‘The Winter Soldier’, a good old-fashioned chase/conspiracy thriller, hits the highest note Marvel have yet sustained. Evans nails Rogers’s moral fibre and righteous indignation to a tee, while the race-against-time narrative as Rogers and Romanoff piece together the clues to uncover corruption in high places, makes for a genuinely urgent and engaging viewing experience, particularly compared to the CGI-heavy silliness of Marvel’s last outing, ‘Thor: The Dark World’.

Naturally, this being a Marvel film and having a budget clocking in at £170million, spectacular action sequences are obligatory, and while a couple of Winter Soldier assaults which erupt into citywide on-the-street mayhem deliver the goods, the film enters shakier territory with the extended finale, not least because Cap-battles-Hydra-villains-on-bloody-big-plane is basically a rehash of the finale to ‘The First Avenger’ but without the human element of his regretful farewell to Peggy in that film.

Such human element as there is in ‘The Winter Soldier’ derives from Rogers’s conflicted response when the identity of his titular antagonist is revealed, and from Romanoff’s ever-so-slight thawing from kick-ass action amoral heroine agent to kick-ass action heroine who might actually have something vaguely resembling a moral conscience.

Elsewhere, ‘The Winter Soldier’ seems to be marshalling its ducks into a row for Cap’s third instalment, unfinished business with the Winter Soldier being the main promise as the credits roll (and, hopefully, a more significant part for Emily Vancamp’s Agent 13, shoehorned into the this outing for seemingly no other reason than to introduce the character). Meanwhile, a mid-credits extra scene points towards the ‘The Avengers: Age of Ultron’.

Overall, ‘The Winter Soldier’ is the most intelligent product of the Marvel stable to date … which – granted – isn’t necessarily saying much, but it’s refreshing to see a superhero movie not made by Christopher Nolan that gets its hooks into the zeitgeist, doesn’t wuss out with easy answers, and treats its audience like adults. Most Marvel films want to throw things at you and yell “whiz bang!” in your ear very loudly and very frequently until you get tinnitus. ‘The Winter Soldier’ wants to sit down and have a conversation with you. It wants to talk about politics, corruption, the surveillance state and the price of both liberty and security. And then it wants to go “whiz bang!” and send you stumbling out of the cinema with a denouement that’s a real game-changer.

Oh, and its ‘Pulp Fiction’ homage is inspired.

The Iceman

Sometimes it’s the performance that makes a film. Off-the-top-of-the-head example: ‘Primal Fear’. An aesthetically redundant, narratively yawnsome courtroom drama transformed into something utterly watchable thanks to Ed Norton’s breakout role.

Notwithstanding that ‘The Iceman’ is an infinitely better crafted film than ‘Primal Fear’, much of it has the tang of the perfunctory while director Ariel Vromen never fully succeeds in engaging with the story’s key dynamic. Based on the true story (and if those words at the start of a movie don’t sound an alarm bell, then you’re probably a lot less jaded a film-goer than I) of hitman Richard Kuklinski, the story starts in 1964 with the inexpressive Kuklinski (Michael Shannon) having coffee with naïve girl-next-door Deborah Pellicotti (Winona Ryder, so not getting away with playing a twenty-something in these early scenes). Later, at a pool game, an acquaintance refuses to pay Kuklinski off over a bet then compounds the offence by making ugly remarks about Deborah. For which he ends up with his throat cut in an alleyway. Shannon plays this pivotal moment to perfection: there’s a moment when he genuinely convinces you – never mind that you’ve just shelled out for a ticket to see him playing one of the most notorious contract killers of his time – that Kuklinski might just let it go and walk away. And when he does walk away, albeit after effecting a straight-razor/jugular interface, the sense of dispassion is shattering. It’s one of a handful of moments where Vromen absolutely nails the tone he’s looking for. He’s not quite so successful elsewhere, though.

Jump forward a couple of years – the first of numerous and often inelegant lurches through a two-decade timeline – and Kuklinski and Deborah are married, with a baby daughter and looking to better themselves. Kuklinski’s working on the periphery of the criminal underworld, cutting film and delivering prints for a low-rent pornographer. A disagreement over a delivery date spins him into the orbit of mob boss Roy Demeo (Ray Liotta). Impressed by how little fear/emotion/give-a-shitness Kuklinski evinces in the face of his goons, Demeo hires him on the understanding that he works for no-one else. Kuklinski takes to the work like a duck to the proverbial. He doesn’t seem to relish killing, but it doesn’t bother him either. It’s just something that he happens to be very good act. Dude loves his family – “You and the girls,” he tells Deborah during the closest he comes to an emotionally-charged scene, “are the only thing I care about in this world” – but as far as the rest of humanity is concerned, he’s utterly cold. Ergo, the iceman.

After a brutally effective Kuklinski-straight-up-kills-a-fuckton-of-people montage, Vromen gets bogged down in the minutiae of underworld politics, mob hierarchy paranoia, rivalry, betrayal and bad decisions. It’s the kind of milieu that Scorsese or Coppola would sail through, sketching out the interrelationships and knife-edge tensions in a scintillating whirl of exposition of set-piece. Vromen isn’t quite in their league and there’s a palpable sense, as events snowball in the largely 70s-set mid-section, of the script stumbling and gasping for breath as it tries to keep up with everything. By now, Demeo’s fuck-up of a right hand man Josh Rosenthal (an almost unrecognisable David Schwimmer) has incurred the ire of another outfit whose consigliore Leonard Marks (Robert Davi) is putting pressure on Demeo to cut the kid loose (in the terminal sense of the word); Demeo’s pissed off at Kuklinski for not killing a witness (a 17 year old girl – his daughters are by now teenagers themselves); and Kuklinski, essentially unemployed, has teamed up with ice-cream van driving hippie assassin Mr Freezy (an equally unrecognisable Chris Evans) to pull in enough money to keep his family in the style to which they have become accustomed. Oh, and there’s also some business about Kuklinski’s nutcase brother Joey (Stephen Dorff), in prison for killing a young girl.

Buried in all of this is the film that the tagline on the poster – “loving husband, devoted father, ruthless killer” – hints at. Because here’s the fascinating thing: when the Feds arrested him after an undercover agent netted him in a classic bit of entrapment, his family genuinely had no idea that he was a mob-employed enforcer who had killed over 100 people. No idea. And if the mechanics of how an essentially amoral hitman not only kept work and home life separate but maintained a façade of domestic normality for two decades isn’t a great concept for a movie then I don’t know what is.

Unfortunately, Vromen is too busy leaping through the chronology (not that the film even considers the real Kuklinski’s already notable criminal activities during the 50s and his association with the DeCavalcante crime family that pre-dated his involvement with Demeo) to focus on this aspect. The script throws out a few lines about Deborah thinking that he works in investment banking, and the whole family man persona is dramatised by means of his daughters hero-worshipping him (why they venerate him is never contextualised).

So why – with the mission statement of this blog being the love, not the criticism, of film – am I spewing 1,000 words on ‘The Iceman’? Three reasons, really. Firstly, its emulation of slow-burn 70s filmmaking is a welcome respite from the flashy tentpole nonsense that has dominated the screens of my local multiplex recently. Secondly, it looks great: akin to Roger Donaldson’s ‘The Bank Job’ and Tomas Alfredson’s ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, it’s a film predominantly set in the 70s that both looks and feels like it was made in the 70s. Thirdly, the performances. There’s an entire cluster of great performances, with Shannon’s towering slab of subdued greatness at the centre. Liotta, in a career based on casting directors exploiting his iconic role in ‘Goodfellas’, is as engaged as I’ve seen him since that movie. Sure, he’s doing the same old gimlet-eyed Liotta shtick, but here it seems authentically dangerous. Davi does his best work for a couple of decades, and Schwimmer and Evans physically lose themselves in their characters in a way I would never have anticipated from either of them.

Above all, though, there’s Michael Shannon. A man without a bad turn on his CV. Who spectacularly graduates from character actor to compelling and commanding lead. The film itself might struggle to achieve bronze on the podium, but Shannon takes the gold.

Avengers Assemble

‘Iron Man’ started it all, coming out of nowhere with the unlikeliest choice for director, and – whaddaya know? – it was pretty damned good. ‘The Incredible Hulk’ delivered a strong first half before degenerating into silliness and tedium with an arse-numblingly interminable denouement which basically featured two screensavers repeatedly twatting each other. ‘Iron Man 2’ wasn’t all it could have been, but featured a couple of stand-out set-pieces and a rollicking performance from Mickey Rourke. ‘Thor’ was hit-and-miss and proved (if ‘Frankenstein’ hadn’t already tipped us off) that Kenneth Branagh is best restricted to quirky low-budget character-driven movies and not mainstream blockbusters.

Then came ‘Captain America’ and – whaddaya know part two? – it was clear that Marvel Studios had got their game on again.

Now we have ‘Avengers Assemble’ (a last-minute retitling lest anyone confuse it with Jeremiah Chechik’s 1998 über-flop) and I took my seat with some trepidation. I had two big worries: there would be too many protagonists for whom screen-time would have to be found; and they’d have to face a threat so overwhelming that things could easily get OTT. And, to a greater or lesser degree, both those concerns remain inherent in the final product. But, with so much expectation – and so much riding on it in terms of future franchise instalments – I have to give writer/director Joss Whedon credit for just going for it with such balls-to-the-wall bravado. The man could easily have found himself in possession of a poisoned chalice. As it is, he serves up a generous measure of something that, even if it isn’t the finest or headiest wine, certainly goes down nicely while you’re partaking of it and never mind that it’s a tad forgettable afterwards.

So what’s it all about? Remember Thor (Chris Hemsworth)’s treacherous half-brother Loki (Tom Hiddlestone) in ‘Thor’? Remember the Tesseract, that blue glowing thing that looks like the bastard offspring of a drunken fumble between a Rubik’s cube and a lava lamp, from ‘Thor’ and ‘Captain America’? Well, Loki steals it from SHIELD – royally pissing off head honcho Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson, finally getting to have some fun with the character after all those cameos) – with the intention of using it to open a portal so that his new best buds, an alien race who want to destroy earth for pretty much the same reason that some people climb Everest (because it’s there), can bring a fuckton of high tech weaponry to the party and start some shit.

The Tesseract theft makes for a scene-setting pre-credits sequence, after which Whedon gets straight down to business which a “rounding up the team” sequence. Here, his opening shot is the best with Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson, looking hot and kicking ass with the best of ’em), in a perilous situation which she effortlessly turns to her advantage. In short order, we’re then re-introduced to Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, taking over from Edward Norton and doing a sterling job – he really communicates a sense of Banner’s battered but still noble humanity), Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr, on cruise control for most of the movie) and Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans, recapturing the pitch-perfect tone of his erstwhile performance). Mismatched and conflicting in terms of their characters, they go after Loki. Then Thor – who has unfinished Loki-based business of his own – comes crashing into the plot and things go haywire.

Whedon has huge fun throwing his antagonistic protagonists together and turning up the heat under the slanging matches and in-fighting. Loki, a grinning nemesis given to Bond villain style speechifying and grotesque flights of egomania, plays them like a piano concerto, even when ostensibly in captivity. Entering its middle act, the film flags a little with the tit-for-tat my-super-power’s-better-than-your-super-power bickering becoming laboured and repetitive. Then Loki’s cohorts bring the fight directly to Fury’s command centre, while his alien backers get tired of waiting and the invasion of earth grows immient. At this point, Whedon changes horses in mid-stream and the in-jokey, fan-boy-friendly storyline segues into a symphony of destruction akin to Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay having a “who can blow up more buildings, trash more cars and conjure more orgasmic explosions” contest in the streets of Manhattan.

It’s not the only stylistic gear-shift Whedon effects. Inspired bits of comedic nonsense (how Loki is finally overpowered is so unapologetically juvenile that it had that audience I saw the film with in hysterics) awkwardly rub shoulders with po-faced serious moments that don’t really have any business in this kind of movie, while Whedon goes for one tub-thumping bit of patriotism too much, particularly in a montage towards the end which evokes (and cheapens) memories of 9/11.

As I said earlier, it’s enjoyable but forgettable. An hour and a half after I got home from the cinema, and I’m struggling to recall certain details. I’m screwed if I can remember what the alien race was called. It sounded like the Chihuahuas. And while we’re on the subject, the scenes on the alien planet are just plain dreadful.

So: better than ‘Iron Man 2’ and ‘Thor’ on points, not as good as the first half of ‘The Incredible Hulk’ but much better than its second half, straggling behind the original ‘Iron Man’ and nowhere near as good as ‘Captain America’. Not an unmitigated disaster, and perhaps as good as it was ever going to be, but with ‘Iron Man 3’ and ‘Captain America 2’ slated for next year and the year after, I’d say the Marvel franchise is a safer bet as individual projects rather than ensemble movies.

Captain America: The First Avenger

In 1991, ‘The Rocketeer’ opened to lacklustre box office. I’ve never understood the indifference; it was a fun, briskly paced WWII-set superhero movie with gorgeous art deco stylings and an even more gorgeous leading lady in the form of Jennifer Connelly.

Twenty years later and director Joe Johnston is spectacularly vindicated as he knocks it out of the park with the best Marvel Studios production yet – ‘Captain America: The First Avenger’, a fun, briskly paced WWII-set superhero movie with gorgeous art deco stylings and an even more gorgeous leading lady in the form of Hayley Atwell.

Factoring in Emily Blunt in last year’s ‘Wolf Man’ remake, there’s probably an academic paper to be written on the role of the smokin’ hot brunette in the films of Joe Johnston, and ordinarily I’d say that I was the guy to write it, but I don’t fancy sleeping on the sofa tonight so let’s move swiftly on.

Apart from a couple of dodgy bits of CGI – just a couple, mind – ‘Captain America’ is pretty much note-perfect all the way through. The key to its success is that Johnston gives the whole thing a nice old-fashioned vibe. Not just in the period recreation, but in his directorial style. Thus an action movie that’s character-driven. An action movie where the camera is held still and the editing doesn’t resemble the work of an epileptic barber – in other words, an action movie that lets you see the action. In an age of shaky-cam and bpm-editing that reduces major set-pieces in movie after movie to an impressionistic blur, this is something to be applauded.

Johnston’s cast is bob on, as well. Kudos to Chris Evans for playing Steve Rogers straight – not even the vaguest hint remains of his smug dickwad turn in the execrable ‘Fantastic Four’ movies, nor does he make the mistake of playing Steve/the Cap as too staunch and all-American. This movie could easily have drowned in jingoistic syrup. Johnston and Evans avoid the pitfalls and deliver the goods. Or should I say, Johnston and Evans and the supporting cast.

‘Captain America’ pulsates with great supporting turns. Tommy Lee Jones is back on form plus VAT as the grouchy Colonel Phillips. I can’t think of another actor who could deliver a line like “you and me are gonna have a conversation that you will not enjoy” with such relish. Hugo Weaving gets a “man of the match” award as Johann Schmidt/Red Skull (a Nazi so demonically evil even Hitler doesn’t want him on the team award). His Werner Herzog-style accent is just brilliant, and his sneering (yet beautifully subtle) ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ reference near the start is priceless.

Stanley Tucci and Toby Jones have great fun doing two contrasting versions of the Eccentric Scientist archetype. Dominic Cooper nicely reverse engineers Robert Downey Jnr’s performance as Howard (father of Tony) Stark. And Hayley Atwell … from her first scene where she proves a point by slugging a guy twice her size, to her various scenes packing heat and exchanging fire along with the guys, to the could-have-lachrymose but actually quite poignant conclusion to her character arc (gently referencing ‘A Matter of Life and Death’), she’s absolutely one of the best things about this movie and if everyone in Hollywood isn’t lining up right now to offer her leading roles then something’s amiss.

Speaking of movie references, the nods to ‘Raiders’ and ‘AMOLAD’ are augmented by homages to ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ and at least two Bond movies. Elsewhere, Johnston’s attention to detail and playful sense of humour is evident: a group of kids read issue one of the original magazine; the hood ornament on the villain’s Mercedes replaces the three-pointed star with a death’s head; a countdown to self-destruction clicks over on a flap display. Even the most outlandish technology on display keys in to a convincing 1940s aesthetic.

The subplot whereby Rogers is pressed into a war bonds fundraising campaign kits him out in a laughable first incarnation of the Captain America costume – a stroke of genius by the filmmakers as it allows us to legitimately laugh at how ridiculous he looks. When Version 2.0 of the costume is introduced, authentically weathered and buffed up and looking the business, it just comes across as all the more cool as a result.

Just as the film itself comes across as a highpoint in the Marvel canon. Joss Whedon’s ‘The Avengers’ suddenly has a hell of a lot to live up to.