People love Captain America: Civil War, the latest Marvel comic-book movie. I mean, they love it. Say a word against it and their eyes narrow; by doing so, you have revealed to them your hatred of fun, and for this you must die. Well, maybe not die. Rather, they are sure you exist in a living death because you cannot enjoy that which is so wildly enjoyable.
It is, without question, about a hundred times better than the last superhero picture, Batman v. Superman (though that’s a low bar, because the Zika virus is too). But what I don’t get about this superhero flick is the same thing I didn’t get about Iron Man 2, which came out six years ago. And that is its plot.
Directors Anthony and Joe Russo, working from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, simply assume they can just breeze by the need to establish its characters and give us plausible reasons for why they do what they do and just get to the conflicts between them the Civil War title promises.
This isn’t my calcified living-death opinion. Joe Russo literally said so in an interview with the website Deadline: “One incredible thing about Marvel is the emotional investment that the audience has in the material has been built up over 10 years. There’s nothing else like that in movie history, where you have characters from different franchises interweaving into a main story line,” Russo said.
Look, there’s no arguing with success. The new movie made nearly $200 million in its first weekend and is likely to be the highest-grossing film of the summer. But I’ve seen all the Marvel pictures over the past 10 years, and I was completely lost; I could not help my daughters, 11 and 9, who have not. After a while, I could only meet the phrases “who is that” and “where are they” and “what’s happening” with a confused shrug.
It seems that the Russos not only expect the movie’s viewers to have taken in the movie’s predecessors but to have done so several times each—and to have read up on their plots on Wikipedia before seeing Captain America: Civil War. That’s just not good story-telling. No doubt it would have been difficult to pull off what Joe Russo said was impossible, but who doesn’t love a good challenge?
All that said, there are, as usual, several sequences of surpassing delight in this picture, which showcase yet again the fact that these Marvel movies work best when they play the action for comedy rather than try to raise sodden and cliché-riddled issues. The centerpiece is a fight between two teams of superheroes on an airport tarmac, in which nearly every beautifully choreographed blow is designed to make witty sport of the rather peculiar powers and weapons they possess.
And Captain America: Civil War simply stops in its tracks for about seven minutes to bathe us in sheer pleasure as Robert Downey Jr.’s sybaritic inventor genius Tony Stark travels to Queens to enlist the help of a teenage kid who has just become Spider-Man. Downey has now played Stark in six movies, and his incomparable comedic timing at last finds its match in Tom Holland, a thrilling Briton who’s not yet 20. The dialogue ping-pongs between them with a hyperactive zing reminiscent of the classic screwball comedies.
All in all, the movie is oddly named—for while its titular character is Captain America, the proceedings are dominated by Downey’s Iron Man. Chris Evans, who plays Captain America well, simply fades from view whenever he shares a scene with the guy. Downey has played Tony Stark for almost a decade, and he still finds a way to make unexpected and thrilling acting choices in nearly every scene.
There’s a staggering bit of special effects at the beginning when Downey is morphed into Tony at 20, with the Russos deploying some freakish computerized magic to make his face look almost as it did when Downey was onscreen as a post-adolescent in the 1980s. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen—but it really works because it’s Downey who is moving and acting and sounding like himself three decades earlier. It’s a feat that sounds easy but is likely the most difficult thing he’s ever done.
If the Marvel Universe is the unprecedented triumph the Russos and everybody in Hollywood claims it is, the whole multibillion-dollar business may owe its greatest debt not to Marvel’s intellectual property but to Downey, whose Tony Stark is the triumph of a superhero of film performance.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
