Captain
America : Civil Wars is a repetitive bore. Slow to get moving, and then
it becomes a long, creaking fandango that alternates between sketchy
conveyed expository dialogue and
excessively choreographed fights ruined by a combination of MTV
editing and a preponderance of seizure inducing camera work that
jittered, jostled and in general neared the visual incoherence of a
Transformers movie.And, for Christ sake, Tony Stark get even more
Bruce Wayne-ish with newly revealed murdered parents issues. What
desperate drag this was.Not that it was badly made, to be sure; CA:CW
had the Marvel/House style that makes sure that matters of camera
angles , cgi effects, fight scenes and editing are executed and
presented in seamless fashion. There is a bland professionalism that has
taken over Marvel Studios that are making their films stylistically
indistinguishable from one another, less so, say, than the sort of
factory-assembled cop shows that dominated 70s television.
This is a shame, of course, because the
Captain America tale on film has had a wonderful arc on screen prior
to the latest offering, beginning with the hero's origins in WW2,
expanding splendidly in the first Avengers film, and evincing great
potential for political intrigue with their plot borrowings from Three Days of the Condor, with the second CA film, Captain America:Winter Soldier. This more closely resembles a Saturday morning cartoon show in the vein of Animaniacs, where
there are dozens of recognizable and more obscure pop culture personas
running about in a varied states of frenzy and violent upheaval, only to
each take a beat to deliver a quip, a joke, an ironic aside. humor
blended with accelerated mayhem is Marvel's signature, but the glut of
heroes fighting heroes, each with a polished repartee is too much of
what used to be a good thing.
The film seems like watching the last acts
at Comedy Store amateur night, and at other times it comes across as
characters auditioning for their own franchises. CA:CW seems only in
service to set up the future of the Marvel Universe . Under-considered,
alternately plodding and manic, hysterically talkative, jittery and
jumbled as an action enterprise, this film is a self-distracting mess.