CAPTAIN AMERICA or CAPTAIN AVERAGE?

It's a bit of a shame really but Captain America has been made purely as a background builder for the new Avengers film due out this year.  This is not just my opinion but it has been marketed this way too.  For example the title is "Captain America: The First Avenger."  I don't believe this means he is the first person to avenge someone so why suggest to the film fan that this is just a piece of the Avengers story?  As such this marketing has probably affected my feelings on the film.  It just about stood up in its own right as an individual movie but it was swaying badly and relied on the support of Samuel L Jackson as Nick Fury and Dominic Cooper, who i thought was fantastic in History Boys, as Howard Stark.  The effects were fantastic, especially in the transformation of Steve Rogers, played adequately by Chris Evans, from the scrawny young man into the super soldier Captain America.  There is a story in there threading its way through the whole "This is Captain America, he is going to specialise in this in the Avengers film." It is based around the rumoured Nazi involvement in the occult during WW2.  A fanatical officer played by another of my favourites, Hugo Weaving, is involved in the early trials of the technology used on Rogers which have somewhat different effect on him than they do on Rogers.  He eventually uses a god-like power source to build himself an army of hugely advanced vehicles of which nothing can stand in their way...except you guessed it, Captain America.  For me the action builds too slowly for what should have been a stand-alone super hero film.  Captain America is third only to Superman and Batman in superhero lore and as such should have been treated with more respect, at least as well as the Iron Man films were (which i thoroughly enjoyed).  I can only recommend it as a device to learn who one of the Avengers team is.  Its ok but not a film i would choose to watch again and I will be more interested in what role the Thor and Iron Man characters will play in the forthcoming Avengers film as these were much better films.  As such i think a better name for this film would have been Captain Average: One of the heroes in the new Avengers film.