CAPTAIN AMERICA (1990): Would You Please Pull Over the Car? I Am Going to Get Sick.

Captain America (1990) – Directed by Albert Pyun – Starring Matt Salinger, Ronny Cox, Scott Paulin, Ned Beatty, Darren McGavin, Francesca Neri, Michael Nouri, and Bill Mumy.

It’s hard for me to call any superhero movie the worst superhero movie of all time given the existence of Catwoman, but the 1990 CAPTAIN AMERICA movie is definitely hanging out in Patience Phillips’ neighborhood.

What definitively elevates CAPTAIN AMERICA above that turkey for me is that, unlike Catwoman, this film isn’t a complete and utter disaster on the conceptual level. I get the feeling that the hearts of the people involved in this film are largely in the right place, even if I don’t feel like there’s a whole ton of fondness for the characters here. It feels like they’re trying to make an action movie instead of an elongated perfume ad – they just don’t have the skill to pull it off.

There are some head-scratching decisions here (the Red Skull being Italian the most egregious) but I don’t get too worked up over those kinds of changes. I’m more interested in movies getting the spirit of a character or story right, and in creating something that works in the context of the movie, and even though the Skull is now a part of the Mussolini regime instead of Hitler’s, the Red Skull (Scott Paulin) is far from the worst part of this movie. He’s still a scheming bastard, he still hates America, and he still hates Captain America because Steve Rogers is prettier.

Catwoman had a budget of $100 million while CAPTAIN AMERICA’s budget came in at $10 million, but even though CAP cost only 10% of what the Berry clunker cost, it’s not the budget that sinks this film. The producers have managed to assemble a pretty decent cast of character actors here: Ned Beatty, Ronny Cox, Michael Nouri, and Darren McGavin all have roles in the movie, and they must have cost something above scale, yes? If they did, I’d rather have seen the producers cast a bunch of unknowns in those roles since none of these parts really gain anything by having a name actor inhabit them, and whatever money they saved here could have been spent on casting a better lead. If all of these name actors did receive the industry minimum, then I wish the casting agents had employed whatever voodoo they used on them to get someone better than Matt Salinger to play Cap.

Movies like this rarely rise or fall simply because of the casting of the lead actor, and CAPTAIN AMERICA is no different. Yes, Matt Salinger is terrible. He is a very stiff, very unnatural actor, blessed with seemingly no athletic ability. How little athletic ability does he have? When the Red Skull, in a full-length leather jacket that would restrict one’s movement, is kicking the stuffing out of him, I fully believe it.

Steve Rogers goes from polio-stricken kid who can’t get into the military to first (and only) American recipient of the super soldier formula (created and administered by an Italian scientist who defected to the U.S. after the Italians subjected a kid to an earlier version of the formula – said kid growing up to become the Red Skull) to flying into battle with the Red Skull in about five minutes. Fittingly, Rogers gets his junk handed back to him by the Skull, and then he gets his rookie ass tied to the side of a rocket that the Italians are aiming at Washington, DC.

They fire the rocket and Cap stops it from crashing into the White House by kicking one of the wings, and he ends up crashing into the ice up in Alaska. The more interesting part of this sequence is that a kid is outside when the rocket approaches and he ends up taking an unclear picture of Cap strapped to the rocket. Tommy and his best friend Sam try to figure out who it is, name-checking both the Sub Mariner (pronounced in the film as Sub-Mareener) and the Human Torch.

One of the things that CAPTAIN AMERICA does well is invest in the idea of the passage of time. Steve makes the journey from the 1940s to the 1990s frozen in a block of ice, but when he awakes, a good number of people from his time are now shuffling around as fifty-year-older versions of themselves. Tommy is now the President of the United States (Cox), Sam is a reporter (Beatty), his Forever Love Bernie (Kim Gillingham) is now married to some other guy and with an adult daughter named Sharon (also Gillingham), General Fleming (Bill Mumy) is now, er, General Fleming (Darren McGavin) and working with the Red Skull, who has gone from a guy with a red face to a guy with a flesh face. (Fun side note that I just learned from Wikipedia: Scott Paulin is currently playing Kate Beckett’s father on Castle. How does Nathan Fillion not have endless pictures of himself, dressed in a Cap t-shirt, fake-punching Paulin?)

All of these characters are loosely connected via Captain America, and so when Cap returns, their lives begin physically connecting. Relax, though, it’s not like a Paul Thomas Anderson film suddenly breaks out (although that would be awesome) – I just mean that all these people start punching one another.

Cap is dug out of the ice by a research crew up in Alaska. When he breaks out of the ice, he starts walking. And walking. And walking. All the way out of Alaska, in fact. When the news of Cap’s return hits the papers (and I love that the POTUS finds out from reading the paper, too), Sam goes looking for him. Steve is totally confused when people start shooting at him, but then Ned Beatty pulls up in his crummy pick-up truck to rescue him.

Yes, let’s all agree that the reason Captain America couldn’t defeat two people with guns who were running after him is because he’s tired from walking out of Alaska and into Canada, and that’s why he needs Ned Beatty to save him. Anyway, Ned Beatty pulls away and Cap thinks this is all a ruse. After all, Sam’s driving a German car and has a “Made in Japan” recorder. Steve feigns being sick to get Sam out of the truck, and then he steals it and takes off, eventually winding his way back to California, where he finds Bernie married to a character actor you will recognize by face instead of name (it’s Wayde Preston, and this was his last role before his death in 1992). In the best scene of the entire movie, Steve is standing outside of the house when Bernie’s daughter Sharon pulls in. He mistakes her for Bernie, says, “Bernie” as he reaches out to touch her all creepy-pervert style, and Sharon slugs him in the face with a six-pack of cans.

It’s pretty funny.

After talking to Bernie, and then watching VHS tapes (ask your parents, kids) full of all the world’s history since he went Popsicle, Steve finally realizes that what he’s experiencing isn’t some Nazi trick, but reality.

Said reality comes crashing down hard on him when a phone call informs them that there’s been an attack at Bernie’s house. Steve’s old flame been killed by agents of the Red Skull, so Cap and Sharon head to the old secret lab where Steve became Cap (it’s still there, forgotten beneath a diner, its entrance hidden behind the wall in a lady’s restroom), and there’s another fight with some Skull agents, and then Steve and Sharon are off to Italy to track down the Skull and put a stop to this. In Italy there’s a big fight, of course, and Cap defeats his nemesis by distracting him with audio footage of the murder of his parents. As a boy, the Skull was taken from his parents by force, and then forced to watch them be slaughtered by the same men who turned him into the Skull.

The same people he ends up working for.

I know, right? Fascists make no sense.

The contemporary Skull has kidnapped President Ronny Cox because President Ronny Cox is a stinking environmentalist. In other words, this is a message film, and the message is … um … if you like trees, the Red Skull is going to kidnap you.

I think.

When you simply write out what happens in CAPTAIN AMERICA, it really doesn’t seem that bad. The foundation is here to do something solid, and director Albert Pyun does a decent job directing the action sequences. There are moments – like the first Cap/Skull fight – where the movie borders on something even beyond mediocrity, but these moments are too few and too far between. Unfortunately, Salinger and Gillingham have to carry the movie, and they just don’t have the skill to do it. Whenever they’re on the screen, the film just sinks and sinks and sinks. It’s a shame because the Cap costume looks pretty good, the story is pretty good, the action is pretty good, and the pacing is pretty good.

But the acting – and this applies to just about everyone in the film except for Ronny Cox, who manages to not be embarrassing – is pretty terrible.

The most perplexing part of the movie (other than the casting of Salinger – how did anyone think he was ready at this stage in his career to be the star of a major motion picture?) is how much of a wimp Cap is throughout the film. Almost every single time someone attacks him, he runs away! In Canada, in California, in Italy, it doesn’t matter! If you attack Captain America, Captain America will turn tail and run away from you.

I think President Ronny Cox punches out more people than Cap during the final battle.

And I’m not kidding.

Unfortunately, this really is a bad movie. Even though there are parts here that work CAPTAIN AMERICA is largely a joyless, sub-par B-movie. Unlike it’s B-movie Marvel counterpart, the Roger Corman-produced The Fantastic Four, CAPTAIN AMERICA doesn’t ooze with that sense that anyone involved here has loads of comic book love, and that can help make a mediocre film more watchable to comic book fans, I think. At least, it does for me. When watching CAPTAIN AMERICA, it just feels like they’re making an action movie where the lead wears a bright costume and no one is committed to the premise.

TOTAL RECALL: See You At the Party, Richter

Total Recall (1990) – Directed by Paul Verhoeven – Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside and Ronny Cox.

“I just had a terrible thought. What if this is a dream?”

Don’t worry, Arny. One, it is a dream. Two, it doesn’t really matter because it’s a pretty good dream. Three, if it is a dream, you get to wake up and go home and have sex with one of the hottest versions of Sharon Stone committed to the screen. So go ahead and play some kissy face with the sleazy but demure Rachel Ticotin before the credits get done rolling.

TOTAL RECALL has one of the more clever excuses in hand if you want to complain about the plot holes or plot conveniences – it’s all a dream that’s manufactured to give Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) the biggest bang for his buck, so of course everything happens exactly when it needs to happen. The key, of course, is that in action movies almost everything almost always happens when it needs to happen, which can leave the audience unsure if what we’re watching is real or simulated. Cleverly, RECALL builds in a backdoor in that, if you want to believe this is really happening, the film offers the idea that Quaid’s reality was actually his dream. Both reality and fantasy thus justify the existence of the other – either Quaid was living a false life (in essence, dreaming while awake) during his marriage to Lori (Stone) and has now woken up, or he was awake and is now dreaming. In the middle sits Quaid’s interest in Mars and interest in Melina (Ticotin) – if Lori is really Quaid’s wife, then Melina is the girl he’s been fantasizing about brought into the dream Rekall (the company that makes the dreams) built, and if Lori is really the waking dream wife, then Quaid’s past with Melina is bleeding through into his reality. Likewise, either Quaid is really obsessed with Mars, or he’s programmed to get back to Mars to complete his mission.

RECALL works on two levels – it’s foundation is an action movie, and above that is all the sci-fi goodness questioning reality. The action is constant and drives the plot and during the non-shooting parts of the film is when the film gets to thinking about what’s real and what isn’t.

As the film opens, Quaid is obsessed with Mars to the point that he’s more interested in watching the news than he is in being ravaged by his hot, frizzy-haired
wife, Lori. He decides to go to Rekall and get a Mars vacation implanted into his head. When they start the procedure, things go wrong/”wrong,” and it turns out/”turns out” that his brain had already been implanted and blah blah blah fight fight kill kill all the way to Mars. (For what it’s worth, when Quaid gets injected with the implant in the side of his neck, you can see that it leaves a clear, dark mark, yet when he starts wigging out, it’s gone. It’s not enough to point to this alone and say, “A-ha! See, it’s all the Rekall dream!” but it is there. Or not there.)

Quaid escapes the facility and makes his way to Mars, hiding as an woman to get through security in the scene famous for Arnold pulling off that multi-leveled mask, and once there he makes contact with Melina, who wants nothing to do with him because she loved him and he betrayed her. As this is playing out, Cohaagen (Ronny Cox), the director of the Mars Colony, has sent his primary enforcer, Richter (Michael Ironside), to capture Quaid and bring him in. Cohaagen’s endgame is to get Quaid to lead him to Kuato, the psychic leader of the resistance that’s growing out of his brother’s stomach.

That was a fun sentence to write.

Michael Ironside is the best part of this whole movie; he’s got laser beam eyes the entire picture and even though Cohaagen wants Quaid captured, Richter is full on trying to kill him – perhaps because in this reality, Richter is married to Lori, who’s been playing house with Quaid to keep an eye on him. Eventually, Cohaagen tells Quaid that he’s really Houser and that this is all part of an elaborate ruse. Quaid never gives up on the idea that this is all really happening and that if he used to be Houser, well, he’s Quaid now and that’s where he plans on staying.

Schwarzenegger is the worst actor in the film among the principals but it works to the film’s advantage. All he has to do is run, shoot, fight, and drop the occasional one-liner (though RECALL blessedly keeps the quips to a minimum), like when he tells the dead Lori, “Consider that a divorce,” or when he taunts Richter after an elevator accident by yelling, “See you at the party, Richter!” It’s these moments where Schwarzenegger seems most alive, almost as if he got to these parts in the script and his brain went, “Yes! I understand this part!”

Twenty-two years out, TOTAL RECALL is a weird film to watch. It’s both incredibly dated because of it’s Ah-nuld center (and Sharon Stone’s hair), but it also holds up better than most Ah-nuld movies because Verhoeven minimizes his main’s star’s Ah-nuld-ness, while still delivering a rocking, straight-ahead action film. The supporting cast – Stone, Ironside, and Cox – is very strong and so is the story. I fully believe what we’re watching is a dream, but I think the film supports both versions to the point that the film’s ultimate message is the experience is what’s important, and not whether that experience actually, physically happened or happened inside your brain. The consequence of the experience being real or imagined might be different but the experience and the memories it leaves you with are both valuable. If Quaid wakes up in the Rekall facility and goes hope to frizzy-haired Sharon Stone, his obsession with Mars that was driving a wedge between them has likely been satiated. And if it hasn’t, it lets him know that there are deeper issues with his marriage that need to be addressed.

Whether we’re talking about TOTAL RECALL, The Usual Suspects, The Wizard of Oz … whatever movie contains a story that “doesn’t happen” inside the narrative that “does happen,” it’s still a story we get to experience. It’s fun to argue about whether the main narrative of TOTAL RECALL is Quaid’s actual experience or his Rekall experience, but either way, we get a pretty decent movie out of it.