The biggest mistake Captain America makes is that the villain is the underdog.

It’s a basic truism that villains ACT and heroes REACT.  It’s a staple of adventure fiction in particular.  Some bad guys have a sinister plan.  Our heroes attempt to stop them from carrying out that sinister plan.  But the pressure is always on the heroes to counter the villain’s plans.  The Rebellion must destroy the deathstar.  Indiana Jones must recover the sacred stones.  James Bond must prevent the nuking of Fort Knox.  And so on.

On paper, Captain America seems like par for the course.  The Red Skull runs Hydra.  Hydra is out to rule the world.  And it’s up to Cap to save the day.  The only difference is how the story plays out.  And how it plays out puts the Red Skull on the defensive.

In fact, the only proactive scenes with the Red Skull involve him attacking an innocent village and killing some troublesome Nazis in order to establish his villain cred.  After that, everything the Red Skull does is purely defensive and reactive.

It begins with the supersoldier program.  It’s true that his agents manage to sabotage the experiment, to prevent the creation of an army of Caps.  But they also fail to prevent our singular Cap from coming into being, and they don’t even escape with the sample of supersoldier serum.  All of this is a foregone conclusion, so it’s unfair to judge all of Hydra’s effectiveness by this one scene.

Yet later, when Cap invades his first Hydra base, frees Allied soldiers, and forces the Red Skull to push the self-destruct button, the pattern is clearly set.  Captain America even learns the details of Hydra’s master plan before walking away, completely triumphant.  Our hero has only failed to capture the Red Skull at this point.  Everything he set out to do, he accomplished.  And while the Red Skull isn’t down for the count, his applecart has been upset.

And so it is in the film that Cap’s victory is so assured that we’re treated to a montage of he and his team beating nameless Hydra agents, destroying equipment and facilities, and otherwise, succeeding without sense of loss or urgency.  Only when we get to the train scene, do we have a cost to these victories, but it is, relatively speaking, a small cost to the team.  And Cap still accomplishes his task.

It all comes to a head in the grand finale, which isn’t much different than a traditional storming-the-enemy-fortress scene.  EXCEPT our heroes aren’t storming the fortress at the desperate last minute.  Nope, they’re the aggressors, the ones who cause the Red Skull to accelerate his plans.  Once again, the heroes dictate the speed of the plot, not the antagonists.  It would be like if the Rebels blew up the deathstar two weeks before it was actually ready to use.  Or if James Bond walked into the evil genius’s lair and just shot the poor villain while he was working on his master plan.

The Red Skull is still able to launch his final gambit, though at this point in the film, he seems an anemic threat.  He might succeed in killing millions of innocent people, but so what?  He’s already lost so much of his power, suffered one humiliating defeat after another, it seems like the spiteful last act of a defeated character rather than his moment of possible triumph.  In the end, the Red Skull and Hydra come across as ineffectual and toothless.  For all their lasers and giant tanks and storm trooper army, they seem never to be much of a threat.  You almost don’t need Cap to take them out.  Heck, even while storming the fortress, Cap doesn’t actually accomplish anything on his own.  He doesn’t open the way for his team.  He just walks in and gets captured then is rescued.  So while his storming of the fortress is cool from an action scene standpoint, it actually accomplishes nothing in itself.  In the end, it takes an army of soldiers to bust down the fortress doors.  All Cap seemed to do was act as a bit of a distraction, and even that’s debatable.

The question is whether or not this dynamic was intentional or not.

Part of me thinks it must have been.  Because it’s just too obvious.  Perhaps Captain America is meant to serve as an homage to American propaganda films of old.  The heroes are bright and shiny and capable.  The bad guys are dark, sinister, and easily foiled with a bit of muscle and determination.  From that perspective, the film works perfectly.  Its portrayal of a world where the righteous fist of justice is more than a match for the forces of evil might be a little blatant, but there’s nothing terribly wrong with that.  I certainly am not looking for shades of gray in a movie where a guy dressed in the American flag fights a guy with a skull for a face.

But from a storytelling perspective, I find it dissatisfying.  We hear the word “fluff” bandied around a lot, but Captain America is fluff.  It isn’t challenging, and even more disappointing, it isn’t even artificially suspenseful.  The audience knows Hydra won’t win, but the story seems to know this too.  And it isn’t interested in disguising that fact.  There’s no illusion of conflict here.  Good guys win.  Bad guys lose.  And there is never really any doubt.

Even the Red Skulls final defeat is so quick and offhand, it’s almost like the film doesn’t really care itself.  “Of course, he loses,” it says.  “He’s the bad guy.”

I don’t know if I consider it a terrible flaw, but it does keep the film from being great for me.  A superhero is only as good as his villain.  And while Cap comes across as a terrific guy with many wonderful heroic qualities, the Red Skull only comes across as a guy in way over his head . . . er . . .  skull.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee

G.I. Joe was freakin’ awesome!

Do you remember when action movies actually had action in them?  Back before The Matrix created a world where action movies have lots and lots of boring scenes where people talk and talk and talk and then, occasionally, someone gets kicked in the head but then we’re right back to talky talky talk talking.

G.I. Joe is a welcome return to that art form.  All hail the return of the genuine thrilling action adventure film, where the good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and shades of gray is for wusses.

And it’s about damned time.

I know that it’ll be fashionable to call G.I. Joe stupid, to say that it’s a ridiculous film built on ridiculous action pieces with two-dimensional characters and an absurd plot out of a Saturday morning cartoon.  The problem isn’t that these cirticisms aren’t valid.  It’s that many will think this is a negative, when in fact, it’s the film’s greatest strength.  Yes, G.I. Joe is based on a line of toys, and the cartoon was often just categorized as a toy commercial.  Rather than hide away from this, the makers of the Joe movie decided to run with it, and the result is more wonderful than words can describe.

Hovercrafts!  Neovipers!  Exosuits!  Blasters!  Ninjas!  Underwater bases!  Doomsday missiles!  Jetpacks!  If this list doesn’t convince you that this movie is awesome, well, save yourself the trouble because it’s clearly too much fun for you.

This was the movie Transformers should’ve been.  A gutsy adrenalin rush of good versus evil tinged with just enough nostalgia to give it a little extra kick.  The movie even improves on the original by managing to make Cobra dangerous.  Though this was more a product of its 80′s origin, Cobra never really seemed a credible threat.  It wasn’t just because they couldn’t kill anyone.  (Death is too often a cheap contrivance in modern adventure fiction.)  More often, their plans were too easily foiled, their schemes so ineffectively executed that they were more like The Three Stooges than an elite secret empire.

But in this film, Cobra proves to be far more effective.  Also, while they are foiled, they aren’t entirely foiled.  In fact, they achieve quite a noteworthy victory.  I won’t spoil the details, but some will undoubtedly think the ending a bit of a cliffhanger.  But to me, it was more of an acknowledgement that the battle between G.I. Joe and Cobra is far from over.  And that Cobra is more dangerous than even the Joes have ever suspected.

I could go on and on about this film, but the bottom line is that you’ll either like it or you won’t.  If the idea of a car chase involving two Joes in supersuits, another Joe on a motorcycle, a souped up SUV with a battering ram, and–not one–but two ninjas isn’t appealing to you, forget it then.

But for those of us who like underwater Arctic bases, doomsday devices, and a dash of Baroness with a healthy side of Snake Eyes, this movie is an instant classic.

Fighting the good fight, Writing the good write,

Lee