C || Captain America: The First Avenger

Title: Captain America: The First Avenger
Genre: Action/Thriller
Release Date: July 22, 2011
Run Time: 125 mins.
Rating: PG-13

Captain America: The First Avenger

"A solid, traditional superhero flick that doesn’t quite stand on its own, and wasn’t meant to."

For a while, I dismissed the subtitle in “Captain America: The First Avenger” as an attempt to sell one of Marvel’s less-popular franchises to audiences who have already been told in the “Iron Man” movies who the Avengers are. (A friend of mine who’s stationed in England tells me that the folks over there are laughing at the trailers, apparently unaware that such a character existed.) As it happens, this movie exists less to establish Captain America for future sequels and more to establish him for next year’s Marvel crossover titan, “The Avengers.” I enjoyed “Captain America” quite a bit, but its incompleteness as a standalone film prevented me from truly loving it the way I wanted to.