![]() ![]() Millar’s concept of the US government enforcing a Superpowers Registration Act dropped in favour of a wishy-washier United Nations ‘Sokovia Accords’ that the real-life US (which doesn’t recognise the International Court of Justice, for instance) would never sign. Indeed, Mark Millar’s comics storyline – like Ed Brubaker’s Winter Soldier last time out – is only lightly referenced by screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. Still, it’s not quite a Civil War (more an Internecine Squabble). There are two big face-offs: a mid-film mass battle on a German airport runway with twelve differently-aligned combatants, and a climactic, more intimate (and genuinely painful) struggle that’s more about character than gimmicks. There are good-to-great action, chase and fight scenes here (though I think Bryan Singer’s X-Men films still have the edge on depicting superpowers) but there’s also a limit to the number of times people can be kicked through walls before the scraps start to feel samey. Repetition has set in and the escalation of set-pieces reaches some sort of a peak. BvS, the second film in a wonky reboot of DC’s slate, had to pit its heroes against each other from a standing start, whereas this pays off plot threads that have been weaving for eight years (though it seems longer). ![]() DC always had the edge over Marvel in icons: their big trinity of heroes crossed over from comics into mass popular culture in the 1940s and remain recognisable to people who can’t tell the difference between Cap’s armoured black best friend (Anthony Mackie as the Falcon) and IM’s armoured black best friend (Don Cheadle as War Machine) or the colour-hoded hot fighting chick on Steve Rogers’ side (Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch) from the colour-coded hot fighting chick on Tony Stark’s side (Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow). It’s not that much of an achievement that co-directors Anthony and Joe Russo (held over from Captain America Winter Soldier) can make a better film than Zack Snyder …but it’s worth admiring the way Marvel (corporation as auteur) and the actors have nurtured these characters (even in weaker films like Iron Man 2) to the point when they carry more weight on screen than Batman and Superman. Incidentally, for those critics and audiences fed up to the back teeth with comic book superheroes as tentpole movies, this is not a good jumping-on point … you either buy into the notion that a supersteroided defrosted WWII icon of integrity and a twitchy billionaire genius in trick armour are characters you can take seriously or you stay at home binge-watching Ozu. Marvel have established these takes on their flagship (and, indeed, flag-draped) characters in earlier Iron Man, Captain America and Avengers movies, and both Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr now inhabit their roles so well that they don’t need to rehash too much of the backstory (William Hurt’s Thaddeus Ross, unseen since the little-liked The Incredible Hulk, shows up early with a highlights reel of carnage caused by earlier super-scuffles) before getting down to business. In essence, the premise is the same: reasoning he can’t beat the superheroes hates but that they can beat each other, a villain pulls strings (some very clever) to arrange what boils down to Iron Man vs Captain America, with an assortment of others mixing it up in the background or on the sidelines. The Marvel Cinema UniverseTM – or is that Marvel Cinematic UniverseTM? – juggernaut rolls on in this 147-minute playground game of ‘who would win in a fight between …?’ That’s four minutes shorter than Batman v Superman Dawn of Justice – and it’s impossible not to see similarities, even if mostly in terms of things BvS did poorly that this handles much better. My notes on Marvel’s latest, Captain America Civil War. ![]()
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