Movie Review: Captain America: Civil War

Under the conditions of a guaranteed audience and box office from fans of previous Marvel Comic's movies and the original comic book characters, is it even possible to come up with a coherent and enjoyable story? So far based on a string of previous Marvel comic movies recently, I would say that the odds of this are very low. It seems the executive producers who make these movies don't really care about a great story and a script that takes a long time to write and then re-write because they already know, just like they did with the recent Batman Vs Superman movie, that the money is already there and they only care about getting it out as soon as possible to maximize their profit. Unfortunately sitting through movies like this can be long, boring, repetitive, annoying and ultimately disappointing.

The newest Marvel comic movie, Captain America: Civil War is a giant 2+ hour excuse to create a conflict and then have all the different super hero's karate fight each other and other criminals, create explosions and show more special effects, most of which we have all seen many times before. There is nothing new or groundbreaking about this movie and the story is all over the place; almost as if so many people and actors and ideas were involved that when it was all shot, it was impossible to connect all the small stories together to make a compelling story that keeps your interest the entire 2 hours. I for one was very bored and after 90 minutes of this, I could not wait for it all to be over.

Robert Downey continues his role as Iron Man and he has to now hold the all-time record for playing a superhero in so many movies that we have all lost count. The money Downey has made playing this one Iron Man character may also be an all-time record when he has played Iron Man for the last time if he has not reached that record already. Chris Evans reprises his role as Captain America and the reason for the conflict between Captain America and Iron Man is because of a disagreement about signing a United Nations charter that would allow the UN to control the Avengers. Iron Man is for this agreement, and Captain America is against it. I thought it was a stretch to believe that this one disagreement would cause a near death battle between the 2 superheroes at the end of this movie or that the 14 super heroes would break off into 2 factions and fight each other over this one issue. Scarlett Johansson reprises her role as Black Widow and its always been hard to fully understand what her superhero powers are, other than being very good at martial arts.

Opportunities for instant death for the Black Widow and Hawkeye played by Jeremy Renner during so many long fight sequences make it implausible that they are really superheroes​ because their only skills are not skills that would make you impervious to explosions and violent conflict which you would think would be some kind of a prerequisite for being a super hero in the first place. For some reason even though just about every superhero is in this movie, the Hulk does not appear which is disappointing because he is the most interesting of all the Marvel characters in my opinion.

After over two hours of set-up and then fight scenes, mostly involving karate and explosions it was time to end this movie which is about 30 minutes too long. Just like I when reviewed Super Man vs Batman about 2 months ago, I cannot really recommend this movie because to make a good or a great movie, you need an interesting story first and this one just does not have one.





Captain America: Civil War - IMDB