Red, white and black and blue

Stylish and fun, 'Captain America' is a loving tribute to a 1940s superhero

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“I finally got everything I wanted,” announces former ectomorph-turned-extreme-hunkSteve Rogers (Chris Evans). “And I’m wearing tights.”

That’s the downside to being “Captain America: The FirstAvenger,” but it seems like a small price to pay for having the ability tobatter those nefarious Nazis into a red, white, black and blue pulp.

Captain America has been around since the early 1940s, anddirector Joe Johnston’s film is, appropriately enough, set in 1942, as millionsof American men are enlisting in the fight against the Third Reich. At the sametime, Hitler’s scary “deep-science division,” known as Hydra, is hunting forthe Tesseract, a jewel that possesses devastating power. For Johann Schmidt(Hugo Weaving) — a.k.a. Red Skull — that’s an artifact he is determined tounearth and utilize for his own sinister schemes.

While Schmidt and Rogers may be on opposite sides, they arenot entirely dissimilar: Both men have reaped the benefits of an experimentalserum that German scientist Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) developed beforefleeing to the States. Rogers got a dose of the perfected serum and wastransformed into Captain America; Schmidt injected himself with an untestedsample and now wears a latex mask to cover his bony, scarlet cranium.

More than other Marvel Comics films, “Captain” has thefeeling of a vintage serial, dressed up with snazzy special effects and dashesof playful humor. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but only in the mildest sense; Johnstonnever allows the tone to become flamboyantly campy or gratingly silly. Evenwhen the action defies logic (why would a villain with a disintegrator ray runaway from soldiers armed only with machine guns?) it’s easy to look the otherway.

That makes “Captain” a perfect companion piece to “TheRocketeer,” Johnston’s 1991 adaptation of the Dave Stevens comic set in thelate 1930s: Johnston’s deep appreciation for the styles of the era is evidentin practically every scene, and he knows how to have some fun with the periodwithout mocking it.

His cast is equally savvy. Evans projects a wholesomedetermination that’s not tinged with irony, and Weaving effectively portraysSchmidt as a truly crazed, diabolical mastermind who eventually envisionshimself to be bigger than even Hitler. After a while, he even coerces hiscohorts into shouting “Heil Hydra!” instead of “Heil Hitler!”

Hayley Atwell is delightfully appealing as Peggy Carter, theBritish agent working alongside (and, of course, secretly infatuated with)Rogers, while Tommy Lee Jones puts a bit of extra bite into his punchlines asthe grumpy but gung-ho Col. Phillips. Although his German accent is goofy,Tucci’s characterization of Rogers’ mentor has real charm, and Toby Jonesimports hints of Peter Lorre into his portrait of Schmidt’s unstable assistant.

The movie has enough explosions and pyrotechnics to satisfythe action crowd, but its most notable visual trick is the one that reducesEvans’ buff body into what Phillips describes as “a 90-pound asthmatic” in theearly scenes. It’s as convincing as the trickery that turned Brad Pitt into awrinkled dwarf in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

Johnston even takes a brief time-out for a musical number,courtesy of composers Alan Menken and David Zippel: Their “Star-Spangled Man,”performed by a chorus of bubbly chorus girls during one of Captain America’swar bond drives, is bouncy, funny and sounds exactly like the sort ofrally-the-troops anthems that would have been composed in 1942.

“The Rocketeer” received favorable reviews but went down inflames at the box office; only recently has it been rediscovered and receivedthe appreciation it deserved. Hopefully, “Captain America” won’t have to wait20 years to find a fanbase.

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