CAPTAIN AMERICA (1990)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Before rewatching this famous flop, I chanced across some imdb review in which the writer opined that this version of the Marvel Comics shield-slinger was at least better than the two made-for-TV Captain America movies from the late 1970s. I loathed director Albert Pyun's film when I saw it in 1990, possibly in a second-run theater since records suggest it never got a full release in the U.S. However, today I'd admit that though CAPTAIN AMERICA is a bad film, it's at least trying to emulate better films, even if it falls on its face at nearly every turn.

Though I'm not exactly more forgiving these days, I can see how badness sometimes arises from exigent circumstances. One of the earliest departures of the film from its source material is that Captain America is not the first "super-soldier," and the super-soldier serum, the creation of Italian lady scientist Dr. Vaseli, gets a trial run on a young Italian boy. This boy grows to become The Red Skull, so called because the serum mutates the flesh of his face (but only his face). Back in the day, I was greatly offended that the script would capriciously change Marvel's archetypal German/Nazi villain into an Italian character, and one who doesn't even choose to be evil of his own will. Now, however, I realize that the writer was probably presented with the exigent circumstance that the film was mostly going to be shot in Croatia, and that Croatian locations were easier to pass off as Italian than as German.

Doctor Vaseli takes exception to the tactics of the Italian Fascists and flees to the U.S., where she works on a better version of her serum for the Americans. Thus The Red Skull (played in adulthood by Scott Paulin) and Steve Rogers (Matt Salinger) grow to adulthood around the same time-- which loosely resembles the story of the comic-book villain's origin-- until the fateful day that Rogers is selected to be the recipient of the serum. The transformation takes place, and as in the hero's comics-origin, an assassin for the other side slays the scientist so that there will be no more super-soldiers. However, one new wrinkle is that one of the American military men in attendance, one Fleming (Darren McGavin), is a mole. Thus after Rogers is trained for his new destiny as the embodiment of American ideals, Fleming betrays the hero's first mission to the Red Skull. When the Captain invades an Italian installation to prevent a missile attack on the U.S., the Skull is ready for the intruder and beats him down handily. The villain ties the hero to the missile and sends both rocketing away to blow up the White House. Captain America can't get free but he manages to redirect the missile away from Washington D.C, so that it flies all the way to Alaska. Instead of blowing up the hero, the missile crashes in such a way as to put the hero into deep-freeze. 

Oh, almost forgot: somewhere in the Captain's rushed rise to herodom, he acquires a girlfriend, Bernie. The character's name comes from Cap's comic-book girlfriend of the 1980s, but she's really based on a 1960s continuity in which Cap had a 1940s girlfriend, Peggy Carter, more on which plotline later.

So, while Captain America sleeps out the rest of the war, the Allies win the conflict anyway. If Red Skull does anything else to hinder the Allies, we never learn of it, but at some point he simply goes undercover and aligns himself with a Mafia-like crime family. He has plastic surgery so that he simply looks like a guy with lots of facial scars, and he sires a daughter, Valentina (Francesca Neri) who becomes a formidable hitwoman. The Skull's killers assassinate Martin Luther King and the Kennedy Brothers, but when his employers want new President Tom Kimball slain as well, the villain decides he'd rather brainwash the politician instead.

Explorers de-thaw Captain America, and the papers carry the news of his revival. Instead of his getting quarantined by the military for months, the hero easily escapes a simple hospital (where some of the Skull's thugs attack him, unsuccesfully). He meets a reporter (Ned Beatty) who helps him with some of his transitioning, and then goes to find Bernie. The old girlfriend is now married and has a grown daughter, Sharon. (In the sixties continuity, Sharon Carter, designed to be Cap's sixties romantic interest, was the sister of Peggy.) Not much later, the Skull's men track Cap to Bernie's residence, but he's not there, so they kill Bernie. Cap gets on the trail of the Skull both to avenge his former love and to liberate the kidnapped President, who just happens to be the grown version of a young lad who witnesses Cap's missile-mission from afar. Somehow Sharon forces her way into the hero's mission, despite having no combat skills, though she eventually has a short fight with the Skull's daughter. As for the Skull, the revival of his old enemy seems to revive his passion for explosive schemes, as he's readied a nuclear bomb for launching. The President, whom the Skull never gets around to brainwashing, escapes and helps Cap and Sharon overcome their enemies.

Though there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this complicated script, Pyun, his scripters and the people behind the cinematography and fight-choreography are not equal to bringing to life the Sentinel of Liberty. Pyun had essentially begun his career with an imitation, coming out with a "mockbuster version" of CONAN THE BARBARIAN, THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER, but despite that film's defects, it was at least competent in duplicating the sword-and-sorcery tropes. With CAPTAIN AMERICA, the model used by Pyun and his scripters is clearly that of Richard Donner's 1978 SUPERMAN. But every time Pyun and company try to say something meaningful about the ideals represented by Captain America, they fall on their collective faces with their phony-baloney gestures. For one thing, their Captain America doesn't even get a chance to rack up a reputation as America's hero. Instead, his first and only mission is only a qualified success, and even then, no one but the audience knows that he averted the White House's destruction. Not exactly "living legend" material. 

The romantic subplot is just as malnourished, and it seems to get forced into the story because every hero is supposed to have a love-interest. When Lee and Kirby introduced Sharon Carter, they may have intended to develop some melodramatic tempest when Peggy found that her sister was in love with her former boyfriend, though Sharon's creators didn't follow through with that plot-thread. But since there's no time for any actual romantic moments, one never knows if Sharon thinks it's weird to be hanging out with a youth-preserved version of her mother's boyfriend.

Matt Salinger tries to look meaningful or courageous according to the mood, but his face always has the expressivity of a block of wood. Scott Paulin spends little time in Skull-face, and once he's just a scarred mobster-type, he plays the villain with a serpentine flair and a twisted sense of poetry about his own evil. It's not the ideal version of the durable super-villain, but at least the actor doesn't embarrass himself here. Everyone else goes through the motions, but they've got little to work with, since the problem is that Pyun and the writers have given the actors flat, simple characters to inhabit.

For the rest of his career, Pyun showed himself to best effect when he confined himself to pure, headlong action narratives, as evinced in 1995's NEMESIS 2 and in 1997's John Woo-inspired MEAN GUNS. The main significance of CAPTAIN AMERICA-- appearing on some international screens a year after the 1989 BATMAN-- is that one sees what would have happened to the superhero genre had it never been transformed by creative types like Richard Donner and Tim Burton, who sold the public on the idea that the genre could produce more than casual, ill-conceived hackwork.