JASON BOURNE Again

Matt Damon last played Jason Bourne in 2007, when The Bourne Ultimatum closed out a thrilling, cohesive action trilogy – and the character’s central drive – with the amnesiac rouge black ops agent learning the truth of his identity and exposing associated CIA misdeeds. Director Paul Greengrass said that he thought Bourne’s story was done, saying further sequels starring the character should be called “The Bourne Redundancy.” That’s why the fourth film was The Bourne Legacy, a terrific spinoff focused on a different agent who grows a conscience that puts him at odds with his agency handlers, which found writer-director Tony Gilroy deftly expanding the scope and possibilities for the future of the franchise. But now, somehow, the fifth time around has lured Greengrass and Damon back for more in the bluntly titled Jason Bourne. It’s a step backwards into the series’ comfort zone. Is there a good new story to tell about this character nearly a decade after we left him? Not particularly. But at least it has a decent grinding competency about it, a solid sense of shaky contemporary paranoia, and a couple great action shots.

Bourne, having spent the better part of ten years off the grid and on the run in the farthest overlooked corners of the world, is suddenly pulled back into the world of espionage and globetrotting skullduggery when an old ally (Julia Stiles) tracks him down. She’s uncovered yet another dirty secret about the CIA’s past involvement in his life. So off he goes, leaving his existence of lonely uncommunicativeness and earning money through backwater underground fighting, to once more look determinedly through binoculars, walk with grave purpose through patient multi-step traps and rendezvous, and slowly work his way into confrontation with the suits who conspire against him. Playing like an unnecessary epilogue to an already complete character arc, the new movie nonetheless operates from a baseline competency not unlike its protagonist’s. All superfluous movies should strive for such slick watchability. It’s restrained and methodical and, when all is said and done, accomplishes very little. But everyone involved is too much of a pro to let it be without some entertainment.

Greengrass, who also co-wrote with editor Christopher Rouse, has a handle on the mood of the piece, and is able to sustain mild interest in dependable scenes of great actors plotting and scheming and debating what to do while they glower at screens and bark into cell phones. He has Tommy Lee Jones as the agency’s director playing a sad-eyed cynic, a part that’d be described as a Tommy Lee Jones-like part if a lesser actor had been cast. He wants Bourne hunted down and to do so activates another in the series’ endless supply of covert killers (Vincent Cassel this time). Then there’s Alicia Vikander, the fresh-faced ingénue straight from a string of much better roles (like in Ex Machina, The Man from UNCLE, and an Oscar-winning turn in The Danish Girl). Here she's an ambitious young agent in normcore clothes who is determined to bring Bourne back into the fold instead of leaving him dead in the street. Elsewhere is Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler, The Night Of, and other projects without the word “night” in the title) as a slick tech CEO whose Silicon Valley startup is entangled in the plot for reasons of token timeliness.

These actors, and Stiles (who doesn’t have enough to do, but that’s true of every movie for nearly 10 years now), go a long way to grounding the thin, insubstantial plot in something like weighty gravitas. They carry scenes of endless exposition by making it believable that these characters would speak to each other in terse jargon-filled exchanges of information. Damon, for his part, shows up after a rigorous workout all muscle, and keeps his head down, mostly silent with a few bursts of interrogation. He’s determination incarnate. Greengrass bookends the film in outbursts of violence and action, the first an escape through a riot in Greece that’s merely hectic, the finale a slam-bang car chase that includes a hijacked armored SWAT van plowing through a traffic jam in a most impressive display of stuntwork. It’s filmed, as you’d expect, in impressionistic smears of chaos cinema, a shaking camera and quick editing that are less precise here than the Bournes have previously been, but it gets the job done.

The least in the series, Jason Bourne is nonetheless a reasonably competent thriller coasting on affection for its predecessors. It’s a pleasure to be back in the recurring ideas and images of these films. The paranoid surveillance plotting can’t undo the comfort food elements of clever prop use in action beats, people snapping orders into headsets, hackers typing furiously, suits staring alternately intently or slack-jawed at screens and case files, Bourne talking on the phone to someone he’s watching through a scope, sudden blasts of gunfire, teeth-rattling car stunts, and Moby’s “Extreme Ways” playing us out into the end credits. The filmmakers’ bid to make the story matter either as a comment on our current world problems – “This could be worse than Snowden,” we hear twice – or to its characters lives – secrets even more closely intertwined with Bourne’s past – mostly falls flat. (That it repeats an inciting incident from The Bourne Supremacy is unfortunate, too.) And in the end the biggest surprise is how long it takes to have so little happen. But there’s that unstoppable competency driving everything along, elevating what could be totally disposable to the realm of passable diversion.

Divorcing the Mob: THE FAMILY

Luc Besson’s The Family is an odd mix of tones, a dark comedy played lightly with violence laughed off right up until we’re supposed to take it seriously. The premise is a fish-out-of-water goof about a Brooklyn family with a mobster patriarch (Robert De Niro), his mob wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), teenage daughter (Dianna Agron) and son (John D’Leo) put in witness protection under the watch of an FBI agent (Tommy Lee Jones) who begrudgingly relocates them every time good old dad reverts back to mob rage and blows his cover. Their latest stop is in a small town in Normandy, France. It’s clear right away that the family doesn’t fit in. Their first day involves lying (dad’s), arson (mom’s), and run-ins with bullying classmates (the teens’). How to fit in? The FBI’s official suggestion is to throw a barbeque and invite the neighbors. But of course the real danger is the team of hitmen on their trail, sent to kill the four of them by a mob boss who sits in jail because of their testimony. One hitman guns down a family in the opening scene, emerging gun-first out of a cloud of smoke. We know these guys mean business.

And yet this threat sits on the outskirts of the story as the movie concerns itself mainly with the family’s earnest attempts to stay out of trouble. De Niro can’t shake the need to get things done by threatening those who refuse to execute his demands in a timely and respectful matter. His wife scolds him, thinking he’s killed the plumber, but he assures her that he merely broke some bones and took him to the hospital straightaway. See? Better already. He spends his days at a typewriter, writing a memoir of his mob life that Jones gravely informs him should never be published. It’s not about an audience for this patriarch. It’s therapeutic. Meanwhile, his wife and kids try their hardest to live normal lives in unfamiliar surroundings. His wife goes to church, his daughter gets a crush on a student teacher, and his son schemes his way into his school’s black market. It’s a film about a wacky big city American crime family clashing with a slow-paced European country town and all the stereotypes you’d think that implies.

We’ve all been down this road before, including some of the cast. De Niro, so good in so many crime pictures from Heat, Goodfellas and The Godfather Part II to tongue-in-cheek spins on his gangster persona like Analyze This, here plays out a character that coasts on this recognition. He’s the wise guy who may be retired, but he still powers through every situation with intimidation and four-letter words. Pfeiffer, no stranger to being Married to the Mob, has great composed frustration bubbling beneath the surface, a complicated indignity towards her current situation she sublimates into motherly instincts. She even makes food for the agents watching the house. When she finally agrees (after assurances of confidentiality) to let the local priest hear her confession, she seems to surprise even herself by that decision. Jones can do the wrinkled stoic exasperation required of him in his sleep, which he might be here for all I could tell. The younger actors, as mob teens playing out scheming and beatings in otherwise typical teen scenarios, acquit themselves nicely.

The characters are purely cardboard, but at least the cardboard is painted with vibrant colors. The leads are appealing and, though the supporting cast doesn’t pop as much as I would’ve liked, there are still plenty of funny little asides coloring in the details. The FBI minders debate the respective merits of French and Italian cuisine. Two mobster hitmen solemnly debate killing a dog they find at a crime scene. “Boss said no witnesses,” one reasons. The priest asks Pfeiffer to leave church property saying, “Your confession has haunted me all week.” The best moment is a bit of metatextual silliness that finds De Niro sitting in a French theater watching a Scorsese movie in which De Niro is one of the co-stars. It’s not only a sequence of nested winks, but a plot point that (in conjunction with a montage of strained coincidences) kicks off the climax. In the end, it’s a movie about how the family that kills together stays together, or how you can take the man out of the mob, but not the mob out of the man. Or something like that.

For a long stretch, the film has too many plates spinning, if only because it often forgets a subplot and lets it drop away, but the likability of the ensemble and eccentricity of the off-beat plotting keeps the proceedings amiable enough. It’s all cheeky, violent, and with largely slipshod comical stakes until the climax when the action kicks up in earnest. French director and co-writer Luc Besson has always been a director better with creating concepts than fleshing them out. His visual energy carried sometimes-flimsy material early on in his career (like The Professional or especially The Fifth Element). It makes a certain amount of sense that he’s spent the last decade or so working mainly as a producer and co-writer on an astonishing number of projects. He’s serving as a sort of cultural ambassador and mentor for French action filmmakers (Louis Leterrier, Pierre Morel, Olivier Megaton, Chris Nahon) attempting to import themselves to Hollywood. In The Family, France and Hollywood are explicitly bumping into each other and that’s fun, but isn’t explored to its full potential. Besson gives the film a sense of off-kilter energy, but the plotting ultimately feels familiar and a tad too slight, no matter the nice-enough work of the cast and occasional splashes of darkly funny dialogue and visual playfulness. I can’t quite recommend it, but have some appreciation for what it does well.

LINCOLN Belongs to the Ages

A big historical drama, all the more weighty and impressive for how simple and contained it feels, Lincoln is an epic of process and detail, unabashedly, unashamedly intellectual and literary, crafted by a master filmmaker in full command of his cinematic powers. Like War Horse, last year’s Spielbergian historical epic, Lincoln is beautifully old-fashioned and powerfully new. The life of Abraham Lincoln is hardly an inauspicious subject matter for a film. No less than John Ford and D.W. Griffith have used the iconic president – routinely considered one of, if not the, greatest American president – as material for impressive filmmaking and biographies in general often lends itself to static, overwhelmingly uneven, films. The genius of Spielberg’s Lincoln is the way he, and Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter Tony Kushner, narrow the focus, suggesting a large canvas with precise brushstrokes of great style.

The very first scene – after a harrowing, closely shot sequence of soldiers fighting with ugly, personal violence ankle deep in sickly grey mud – recognizes Lincoln as icon, as a stovepipe-hat-wearing, Emancipation-Proclamation-signing, quotable rhetorician of the public imagination. The camera watches adoring soldiers, some black and some white, who, as we’ll soon learn, have memorized the Gettysburg address. As the dialogue plays out, Lincoln remains off-screen for quite some time, slowly revealed sans hat, sitting casually, but leaning slightly forward, listening with evident interest. The Lincoln that the film proceeds to reveal scrapes away the fawning legacy and replaces him with an even more glorious portrait of a human man, smart, charming, troubled, wise, and crushed down under the burdens of the job and anxieties in the face of overwhelming uncertainty.

This portrayal’s greatness rests, first and foremost, with Daniel Day-Lewis in a performance so good that it could more accurately be called an inhabitation. Will I ever cease being surprised by Day-Lewis? Having already earned his reputation as one of the very best actors of his generation several times over, this feat of acting is no less completely convincing. From the first second he appears on screen, I forgot I was watching a performance, let alone a performance so remarkable and convincing that it’s as if a 150-year-old photograph has come to life. No, from his first to his final moments on screen he is fully and completely Abraham Lincoln. This is acting from the inside out with a presidential posture, lanky country lawyer mannerisms, and a hoarsely emphatic tenor that slips slightly higher for emphasis. We see that he’s an ordinary man who has bad dreams, who enjoys telling anecdotes as a way to charm his way sideways into larger points, who occasionally fights with his wife (Sally Field) and adores his surviving sons, one older and collegiate (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the other younger (Gulliver McGrath), scampering around the White House in a child-sized army uniform. Unlike characters in lesser biopics, this president is simply a man doing his job, unaware of his historical importance.

Instead of a sweeping skim across the surface of Lincoln’s life, or even just the Civil War, the film, based in part on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, concerns itself with early 1865, the final months of the war and the attempt to pass the 13th Constitutional amendment which would eventually end slavery once and for all. What unfolds is a legislative procedural, a thrilling and involving clash of personalities and powers that reveal the messy, halting uncertainty of doing the right thing. This is a film that successfully removes the certitude of hindsight, drawing its story in a way that’s immediate and powerful with a hugely talented ensemble of actors in terrific supporting parts. We meet members of the cabinet (David Strathairn and Bruce McGill) and Lincoln’s staff (Joseph Cross), passionate abolitionists (Tommy Lee Jones, David Costabile, and Hal Holbrook), vehement opposition (Lee Pace and Peter McRobbie), undecided votes (Michael Stuhlbarg and Walton Goggins) and those lobbying to win them over (John Hawkes, Tim Blake Nelson, and James Spader). When Congress is in session, the halls of power reverberate with passionate arguments, sneering counterarguments, and witty rejoinders that become a raucous clamor of insults, outrage, and powerful rhetoric.

Tony Kushner’s lively script gives all of the actors wonderfully written, fully formed roles. In fact, this script as a whole is a marvel: sharply written, dense, easily complex and learned, funny, moving, and genuinely inspirational as well. After Angels in America and Munich, he continues his pattern of turning history into deeply felt, expansive works of art. With Lincoln he’s written one of the sharpest, smartest screenplays in recent memory, eagerly intelligent and memorably erudite in a way that respects the audience’s ability to keep up. He gives the film a structure of conversations, debates, and monologues that Spielberg films closely and attentively. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, painting the frames with light, generously holds the actors steady in the frame, slowly pushing in for dramatic emphasis or pulling back to reveal import of relationships within their surroundings.

This is a film of deceptively simple craft; beautifully complex compositions and subtle camera movements add up to an epic that’s gloriously restrained, spending much time indoors amidst impeccable period detail of mud and cold, flickering flames and creaky floors. Perhaps Spielberg’s least formally showy film is in fact a tremendous fragile beauty with sharp lovely imagery that bores into the core truth of any given scene. There’s nothing inherent in the material that’s stopping Spielberg from pulling back, sweeping his camera across a CG 19th-century Washington D.C. skyline or panning across a massive troop formation. But he keeps his camera close, emphasizing the humanity of these historical figures, no matter how heroic or loathsome. It’s a film about how epochal historic change is never easy, is made by flawed people trying to balance idealism and pragmatism to the best of their abilities.

The film’s an experiential nail-biter, as involving and transporting as period films come. Though we know how it all must end, the film’s final moments hit triumphant notes of uplift and sorrow. Lincoln’s assassination is handled beautifully, all the more powerful for what it omits and elides. It’s smartly staged, sure, but it’s also hugely emotional, one of the most powerful death scenes in recent memory despite its tact and relative lack of sentiment. A film that begins by humanizing an icon returns this man to his iconic status, a position all the richer for having lived through his final months. Now, once again, he belongs to the ages.

Couple's Retreat: HOPE SPRINGS

It’s always nice to see a Hollywood film about adults with adult problems handled in reasonably mature ways. That provides a break from all the movies about kids, teens, and adults who act like kids and teens. But I think Hope Springs goes beyond the pat demographic longing that informs so many comments from people desiring a more grown up look at characters. It brings a slow, mellow mood that for the most part simply looks on as an aging couple struggles to keep the spark of marriage alive. Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones play a wife and husband who sleep in separate rooms, go about mostly separate routines, never really say what’s on their minds, and never physically connect for anything longer than a peck on the cheek. Even a hug seems to be too much to ask.

Change comes when Streep forces Jones to go with her to a couples’ retreat in Maine for intensive therapy with a renowned marriage counselor. Steve Carell plays him. A great deal of the film is devoted to these three actors sitting in a therapist’s office. In mostly medium shots, Carell calmly asks questions and then we cut across the coffee table to Streep and Jones answering them. After each session, husband and wife walk around the small tourist town and struggle to enact the intimacy challenges that the therapist has just given them. This is a gentle, mildly comic drama that plays out. We watch as two people who have not so much grown apart as grown uncommunicative and then formed some deep ruts of routine try mightily to find their way out, a way to rekindle the romantic sensations of the early years of their marriage, times that are nearly thirty years in the past.

Though the film didn't ultimately win me over, I admire the seriousness with which director David Frankel (of The Devil Wears Prada) and screenwriter Vanessa Taylor (of several TV shows, most recently Game of Thrones) approach this material. There’s little strain for humor or uplift. It’s a film on an even keel that trusts good actors to bring the charm and conflict that will let the gentle humor bubble up rather naturally. Though the humor is there at times, it doesn’t arrive from the simple fact that older people might want intimacy or from a point of view that mocks the couple’s dysfunctions. It’s essentially a quiet and compassionate little movie. Streep and Jones give gentle performances that go a little against type, but because they’re such total professionals who take the whole thing as seriously as the director and writer, it basically works.

She is a woman who has been closed off for so long that her daring to take the journey to get help feels like a radical act. She’s willing to do what it takes to make their marriage work. At first Jones seems to be playing his typical craggy curmudgeon role. He complains about everything all the way there and for a good while after they arrive. But soon it becomes clear that he’s just as hurt as she is. In a career of tough guy wisecracking, here’s a role that calls for real vulnerability. That he pulls it off so well is further proof, if for some reason you need some, that he’s just as much a national treasure as his co-star.

But for all there is to admire about Hope Springs, it sadly felt hollow to me. For all of the therapy sessions and emotional revelations, we don’t really get to learn much about the characters. An intriguing scene of the couple telling their romantic history to the therapist quickly becomes a montage that’s basically the film in a nutshell. It’s interested in using its concept for quick engagement rather than the kind of deeper, character-based work that the actors appear more than capable of exploring. This is not a season of the underrated psychiatrist show In Treatment condensed into 100 minutes. No, this is a movie that’s content to appear serious, show off solid performances, but never really dig in and turn into something really special.

In what is probably the most disappointing narrative choice, the therapist character never becomes a character at all. Forget that Carell, a charming screen presence himself, fills the role. He has nothing to do. If the film ever gives him a line of dialogue that is not related to asking the couple questions or ever reveals anything about him other than his profession, I must have missed it. There’s no good reason why he’s in the movie at all. Streep and Jones might as well be talking to a robot or reading marriage advice out of a how-to book. But who can blame Carell for wanting to act in the same room as these legends? They’re certainly the only good reason to see the movie. And even that’s not quite enough of a reason for me to recommend it in any way other than half-heartedly.

Blast in the Past: MEN IN BLACK 3

Men in Black 3, like Men in Black and Men in Black II before it, grabs ahold of some ingenious science fiction concepts and proceeds to goof around with them for an hour-and-a-half. The main difference now is that it’s been ten years since we’ve last been inside the mysterious government agency to follow stoic Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) and motormouth Agent J (Will Smith) as they try to keep track of alien immigrants to our planet and make sure that they aren’t causing any kind of intergalactic ruckus. That’s twice as long as the time between the first film and its sequel. Has twice as much changed? Not really. They’re still out there, just one partnership in the Men in Black, out to clean up extraterrestrial messes and preserve the secrets of the universe from the unwashed masses.

This franchise is essentially a procedural, a feature film version of one of those cop shows that seem to run for season after season, the kind you might forget about for a while and then one day turn on your TV and find that the likable characters are still up to the same old same old. A Men in Black movie starts with a big bad alien villain, this time a creepy assassin played by a black-eyed, monstrously toothy Jemaine Clement with wild, scruffy hair, who gets to Earth intent on wreaking some havoc. Cut to K and J as they finish mopping up their latest case, inevitably having to scramble some pedestrians’ short-term memories in order to implant their cover story. Soon enough, the villain’s trail of destruction winds its way to Men in Black headquarters where heavy exposition is dumped on the agents, and the audience, by the head of the organization. (This time it’s Emma Thompson filling in quite nicely for Rip Torn.)

If the rule of making a satisfying sequel is to do the same thing, but different, then Men in Black 3 is the best of the bunch, or at least the best since the first. It takes the charming premise of the first film, which rests entirely on the wondrously kooky alien designs by Rick Baker (bulging brains, fish faces, wiggling antennas, prehensile tongues, and slinking tentacles all accounted for) and the off-kilter buddy cop chemistry between Smith and Jones, and scrambles it around a little bit. Men in Black II was too interested in rehashing instead of reinventing, spending a good chunk of its runtime resetting the plotting instead of expanding. There’s not much expanding going on here either, but the plot doubles back on itself in enjoyable ways and smartly puts its focus largely on the relationship between Smith and Jones. The story is all about time travel, a risky idea to introduce into any film, let alone a sequel, but here it helps shake things up.

The villainous alien starts the movie escaping from a lunar prison vowing revenge on K, the agent who put him away forty years earlier. Once he gets back to Earth, he finagles his way back in time and kills K, which sets off the course of events in the future that brings J into the past. It’s 1969, to be exact, which gives the bulk of the film the slightest feeling of being a very-special alien spin-off episode of Mad Men. (Was Jon Hamm or John Slattery not available to cameo?) There’s a groovy retro-futurism going on here, which gives Bo Welch’s production design room to give us the same but different. (I especially liked how the portable mind-scramblers worked back in the day.) The villain is roaring around on a motorcycle like he roared in from Easy Rider, while the film enjoys the opportunity to show off some notable 60’s elements, like papering the background with news reports of the impending moon launch and finding reason for the agents to visit Andy Warhol (Bill Hader).

Speaking of the same, but different, K is played in 1969, not by Jones through some computer-trickery, but by Josh Brolin, who does an impression so dead-on accurate it’s a wonder that no one’s thought of doing something like this before. He gets Jones’s unflappable squint, easy drawl, and the sly bemusement teasing about the corners of his eyes. But, since he’s playing a younger version of K, he has a bit more looseness and fun in his investigative technique (not much, but it’s noticeable). He’s a dapper man in black who’s so dedicated to his job that when a man comes frantically crashing into his life claiming to come from the future, he’s not too fazed by it. K and J go zipping around New York City and the movie is just like old times, except technically, for K at least, this is the first time.

I don’t quite know who to credit with all of these smart ideas. With straight-faced silliness, director Barry Sonnenfeld’s clearly the auteur of the series (that and Rick Baker’s alien designs are most consistent between the three pictures), but this particular script has a notoriously messy past, what with filming starting before its completion. The final product is credited to Etan Cohen, David Koepp, Jeff Nathanson, and Michael Soccio, and there’s surely plenty of uncredited input from countless others as well. It’s just that kind of movie. That the messiness of its creation hardly shows in the film itself, aside from some clunky scenes here and there, is a nice surprise. And whoever wrote into the film the major supporting character of a fifth-dimensional being who lives in all possible futures at the same time (a terrific sci-fi idea) deserves much praise. You know who you are, I guess. Even better, the great Michael Stuhlbarg plays him with a spaced-out, out-of-this-world speech pattern. He’s the film’s best creation.

Like its predecessors, Men in Black 3 is a movie with goofy gross-out creature moments, like the villain’s slimy, spike-shooting hand, and grinningly juvenile gags, including implicating several celebrities as secret aliens. It’s all so brightly lit and colorful. This has always been a series closer in spirit to Ghostbusters than X-Files. They’re big-budget, effects-driven larks. This one in particular is just so pleased with itself and relaxed. Despite world-ending stakes it’s all so laidback. You’d think there’d be more momentum, but each picture in the series has gotten increasingly slack. Still, that’s all part of the charm. I have affection for these movies, and I suspect that most who do will leave the theater satisfied. It brings the series something like full circle and the concluding moments contain a surprising note of sweetness and earned emotional payoff between K and J that retroactively gives their relationship an added dimension that’s actually rather moving. It’s always a nice surprise to find a late-arriving sequel that manages to justify its own existence.

Hope and Glory: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

Captain America: The First Avenger is the purest distillation of the serial adventure narrative aesthetic since Raiders of the Lost Ark introduced us to Indiana Jones (an adventure this new film obliquely references). To say Captain America isn’t as good as Raiders is merely saying that it isn’t the best action movie ever made. That’s hardly too big a strike against it, is it? This is a pulpy men-on-a-mission World War II picture with a big splashy dose of period detail and winking homage to every little bit of its genre roots. There’s always another cliffhanger around the corner, sometimes literally, right up into the end credits and beyond and through it all storms Captain America who, far from being yet another indistinguishable smirk in tights, is actually built upon a full-fledged character worth caring about. This, my friends, is the fully satisfying pure dose of superheroic adrenaline that I’ve been craving all summer.

Before we even get to Captain America, and all the explosive pyrotechnics that follow, first we must meet Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a puny guy with a good heart, who desperately wants to join the United States Army. It’s 1942, you see, and Nazis are marching across Europe. (There’s conflict in Asia as well of course, but the movie doesn’t have time to fight on two fronts). While thousands of Americans are doing their part, Rogers is forced to sit on the sidelines, placed there by his size, his asthma, and his basic lack of muscle and toughness. He’s filled with a sense of justice and civic duty that is unable to find full expression, but only until a kind military scientist (Stanley Tucci) takes pity on him and allows him entry into a special training camp that is looking for the right man on which to try out a new program.

Under the direction of this scientist, as well as hotshot engineer Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper), a lovely British intelligence officer (Hayley Atwell), and a craggy general (Tommy Lee Jones), Rogers is dosed with a specially formulated serum that adds musculature and stamina, lifting away his physical weakness, creating a “super solider” out of him. He’s even better than expected, which is good because the Nazi “deep science division” led by the villainous Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving) is on the march, having discovered a glowing cube of some import in a remote Norwegian village and developed it into a kind of supercharged energy weapon.

Rather than allowing all this to become overly somber, silly, or convoluted, the three most common errors in so many recent movies of this kind, Captain America barrels forward with a ceaseless sincerity and energy from moment to moment. It’s tremendously exciting with great bits of character and comedy for seasoning. But rather than mercilessly grinding its way through a chaos of effects and computerized daffiness, this is a film with shape and emotion, a sense of set up and payoff and of fully realized characters in a fully realized world. Each action beat feels like a part of the plot in important ways, but even when the Captain isn’t flinging himself and his men through combat, the movie is still hugely entertaining.

Take, for instance, a detour on the way to the front lines that finds the U.S. government parading Captain America across the country promoting war bonds that’s a sequence of color and music that’s both a critique of propaganda and essential character building. Rather than flinging the audience straight into the action, the film has introduced us to scrawny Rogers, moved him through science fiction hocus pocus into a superhero and then takes its time in allowing the character to explore his new persona. The best origin story films, like Richard Donner’s Superman, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, and Sam Raimi’s Spider-man, allow the character to feel his way towards the iconography, the outsized iconic persona we all have in our heads on our way into the theater. And you certainly don’t get much more iconic than the star-spangled Captain America who famously punched Adolf Hitler on the cover of his very first comic book in 1941, an image that gets a nice little reference here.

With a character so tied to the World War II iconography of the culture’s imagination, it makes perfect sense for the narrative to reflect the adventure serials of the day. But in its colorful Cinemascope presentation it also feels visually similar to the retroactive glorification of the conflict that occurred in the widescreen war flicks of the 50’s and 60’s. All of this retro style and content is filtered through a sleeker, more modern effects machine and then steeped in timeless sturdy craftsmanship. Here is a film with clean, uncomplicated visual comprehensibility put to use telling a fully realized story with characters charmingly acted that go through emotional arcs and events that add up into a fulfilling climax. It’s popcorn pleasure of a high quality.

Director Joe Johnston, a solid if often unremarkable filmmaker, has been in this territory before with his 1991 retro actioner The Rocketeer, a fun flop that has a small and reasonable cult following. He bests his work there creating, I dare say, the best film of his career by far. It’s all of a piece, fitting perfectly between two genres, suiting each just fine. It’s both a crackling period piece action film that smartly shies away from mindless jingoism and the most fully engaging character-driven stand-alone puzzle piece in the larger superhero universe that Marvel has been building with their other features like Iron Man and Thor. But that’s just added bonus to the simple fact that Captain America is flat out the most fun I’ve had with a big budget studio adventure in a very long time.