Captain America: Civil War is far from a perfect comic book action adventure, but it does have a lot more layers than expected, which works well to redeem the glitches in thinking and delivery that bring it down a little. The biggest factor in this is the strength of its dissection of the complexities of war and the international politics that surround it, which is no mean feat when the core of the film is about a group of super-powered superheroes.
It doesn’t entirely make up for the occasional acting fail, dialogue goof or CGI tell that creeps into the mix, but it does make you appreciate some of the smart sentiment behind it all. War is messy, complicated, emotionally-wired and wracked with political wrangling and somehow Captain America: Civil War manages to bring all of this to the surface, while still creating a high-intensity superhero flick in the same fell swoop.
It’s not to say that all of the acting is bad, or that the film is plagued with terrible dialogue and special effects, it’s just that there’s just a little too much of these elements than you’d expect from a film with so much financial clout behind it. With Disney’s wealth and Marvel’s superhero know-how, the film should have been hard to fault, but it’s not entirely, which is a shame, because it has so many positives and so much potential running through it.
It’s possible that our expectations are on the high side, but when you look at the people and organisations behind the movie, we’d argue that it’s OK to have high expectations. There is no stretched SFX budget or skimped casting here; the directors are the same Emmy award winning siblings, Anthony and Joe Russo, who also directed The Winter Soldier; and the screenplay writers are Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who’s credits include The First Avenger, The Winter Soldier and Thor: The Dark World, and they’ll be writing Avengers: Infinity War. When you take all of this into account, Captain America: Civil War should have been perfect, and while it gets close to the sun at times, the glue starts to come away all too frequently for it to really impress.
On a positive note, the cast has a lot going for it, even when it’s forced into situations that don’t quite work all that well – for example, Tony Stark’s clumsy visit to Aunt May’s house, which could have been delivered with a lot less cringe factor. Chris Evans is as much the perfect Captain America as Chris Hemsworth is Thor or Robert Downey Jr. is as Iron Man. While Hemsworth isn’t in the mix in this outing, both Evans and Downey Jr. bring a lot of steady weight to the film. They work well in fight sequences and have come to embody their characters with a lot of magnitude behind them.
Scarlett Johannson (The Jungle Book) is class as Black Widow, but while both Jeremy Renner and Don Cheadle are decent enough as Hawkeye and War Machine, there’s almost too much going on for them to get the air time to factor in all that much. Anthony Mackie and Paul Bettany are a bit lost in the broil of everything else as Falcon and Vision, but they both have a couple of good fight scenes that help to define them more. Vision seemed out-of-character at times, though, losing his otherworldly, all-knowing omnipotence in favour of fealty to Stark and a lack of consideration for the consequences of his own actions.
The introduction of T’Challa / Black Panther and Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe – played very well by Chadwick Boseman and Tom Holland (In The Heart of The Sea) – is pretty effective on the whole. There are a few clunky elements that don’t help their cause, including T’Challa’s kingdom of Wakanda, which just sounds silly, no matter how well steeped it is in comic book history, but in general we’re looking forward to seeing each take on their own standalone films in the years to come. They looked epic in the fight scenes and though the characters are very different, they both had good lines, which they delivered with a lot of unique personality. However, the addition of Martin Freeman (Sherlock Series 4) to the cast was a complete waste of effort as his government official character is inconsequential to the rest of the film.
Elizabeth Olsen is strong as Wanda Maximoff / Scarlet Witch, as she grows into the role following her switch to the good side at the end of Avengers: The Age Of Ultron. However, it’s a shame we didn’t get to see more of Paul Rudd as Scott Lang / Ant-Man or Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter, because they’ve both got the capabilities to contribute more to the underlying qualities of the film.
The reality is that a film like this is won and lost depending on the strength of the bad guy and Captain America: Civil War is lucky enough to have two with Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier and the acting might of Daniel Brühl (Alone In Berlin) as Helmut Zemo. There’s a good amount of complexity to the back story of both, questioning the nature of the black-and-white of good vs. evil, which makes the film much less predictable than expected.
The portrayal of Zemo as such an intelligent, calculating and resourceful normal guy makes for compelling viewing and Brühl is the perfect actor for the job. Admittedly, there’s a lot of creative license to the film’s adaption of the character from its comic book heritage, but it’s one that works well as a modern day rework.
The action is fairly intense with some great fight scenes, but the overuse of CGI and the lack of scrutiny on the special effects means that it can look overly unreal. Sometimes less is more, but here the philosophy appears to have been to dial it up to eleven, but that only really works if you’ve either got something that’s genuinely faultless or you’re looking to raise a laugh. However, what we’ve started to notice is that CGI that works well on the big screen in 3D doesn’t always translate all that well to DVD and that could be the case here.
Overall, Captain America: Civil War is worth a watch, and maybe even an addition to the collection for superhero die-hards outs there, but it isn’t quite the classic that it could have been. It’s got a lot to take credit for, but when a scene drops that feels completely out of the loop, or a line lands that’s clunkier than the Hulk in high heels, the whole thing loses traction.
Captain America: Civil War DVD review: 3/5
