Captain America

MOVIE #1,783 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 07.04.24 ALBERT & AKERMAN: AN AUTEURIST STUDY IN CONTRAST + CONTINUUM I will once again turn to Justin Decloux’s great book Radioactive Dreams for an assist (or two). This is a great observation which nicely sums things up: Cap's main superpower is pretending to be sick while in a car, and when the driver gets out to see if he's okay, Captain America: The First Avenger jumps behind the wheel and zooms off. This ruse happens twice! Twice! A desperate person with something to prove could analyze the production as a rye satirical commentary on the ineptitude of America on the world stage — That for all its conceptual hero making myths, it's really a joke to everyone who stares at it dead on.

Because this is an Albert Pyun film, the perils of the production have to be mentioned. Decloux writes, “the producers…took the picture out of his hands [and] Cannon delivered a barely coherent cut and released it to gales of public laughter. Pyun swears to this day he’s never seen the final release version.” That it still manages to be so fun is perhaps the ultimate testament to Pyun’s talent.

That isn’t to say it’s ‘good’ by any traditional metric. It’s sloppy as hell and flat-out ridiculous at times (although I’m convinced that at least 80% of the hatred for it is due to how dorky and bad the design of Captain America’s suit looks).

A quick note on my relationship with Marvel/superhero movies before I continue. I’m not a fan. I think I’ve only seen two MCU movies in their entirety? (Iron Man 1 and the first Guardians of the Galaxy). I watched the first fifteen minutes of Black Panther one night before turning it off in disgust. I try my best not to wade in the waters of this great cinematic divide, but Martin Scorsese is 100% correct on the subject. I wish we could accept that and be done with it. I’ve often considered subjecting myself to the entire universe of these movies as an experiment, but that seems like torture. I’m happy to say, as politely as possible, that they’re not for me, and move on with my life.

I have young children who are not yet of age for this fair, so I have no reason to see these types of films (unlike cartoons). I mostly stuck it out with the Star Wars canon out of some sense of loyalty and nostalgia, although it was clear to me from the get-go that these were also being made for children (unlike the prequels, which weren’t made for anybody). And while I enjoyed Captain America (1990) for what it is (and “what it is” is superior to our current parade of Marvel nonsense! yeah, I said it!!), I also couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching a children's movie. But I’ll take a kids’ flick directed by Albert Pyun over other kids’ flick offerings any day of the week.

What struck me most about this picture was its breakneck pace. The mile-a-minute plot moves faster than you can process it, like the full arc of a trilogy in 90 minutes. I’ve never seen exposition so haphazardly shot out. Time jumps forward decades at a clip from the 30s to the present day. One second Ned Beatty is there and the next he’s gone (RIP).

I’m not a comic book BOOK guy either, so I can’t say if any of this stays true to the source material. Twenty minutes in and our hero is already fighting (and losing to) the villain Red Skull. And here I am still wondering what happened to this Italian stop-motion mutant rat…


Fun fact: This was the second movie in the last 48 hours I watched that featured the dad from A Christmas Story (see also Jack Sholder’s By Dawn's Early Light, also 1990). God love Darren McGavin but that is too much 1990 dad from A Christmas Story!


Look, where Pyun has failed early in his filmography are the times when nothing much happens (I’m thinking of all the dead air in something like Vicious Lips and not the minimalist genius of Deceit). This is not a complaint you can levy against Captain America. The pace is broken and probably ineffective, but it is never boring. Also, I was fully unaware of lead actor Matt Salinger (son of, yes, THAT Salinger, if you can believe it) but I found him to be a charming presence…


I look forward to one day seeing him in 2018’s Wetware, starring Jerry O’Connell (one of the most slyly gross-sounding film titles I've ever stumbled across).

It’s an oversimplification if there ever was one, but what makes this movie cool is just how precisely uncool it is. I’m not being a contrarian here: it delivered the goods in terms of what I’m looking for from an Albert Pyun film or any film of this ilk. Throw in the director’s very admirable shoehorning of an environmental message — complete with this plea in the credits…


— and you’ve got a winning formula. Albert Pyun was ahead of his time, man...


Recently, on one of my favorite podcasts, The Best Show, they ranked the “TOP 25 WINNERS WHO ARE LOSERS/LOSERS WHO ARE WINNERS.” I think you could have absolutely included both 1990’s Captain America and Albert Pyun himself in the latter category.

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Captain America is a 1990 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics superhero of the same name. It is directed by Albert Pyun and written by Stephen Tolkin, from a story by Tolkin and Larry Block. It stars Matt Salinger in the title role and Scott Paulin as his nemesis the Red Skull, with Ronny Cox, Ned Beatty, Darren McGavin, Francesca Neri, Michael Nouri and Melinda Dillon. The film produced by Menahem Golan for the now-defunct 21st Century Film Corporation. It was released on December 14, 1990.