Captain America

It's a summertime delight to note that Hollywood can still deliver good old-fashioned action-adventure blockbusters. Happily, "good" is a fair adjective to apply to the newest Marvel Comics movie franchise, Captain America: The First Avenger.

All concerned with the production must be chuffed that one of the first choices for director, Jon Favreau, backed out of the project. This enabled a veteran talent to step in: Joe Johnston, whose first feature was the 1989 hit, Honey I Shrunk the Kids. Since then, he's only made six full-length film features. They're an impressive line-up of above-average mainstream entertainment: The Rocketeer, Jumanji, October Sky, Jurassic Park III, Hidalgo and The Wolfman.

He'd already won an Oscar, in 1981, for Best Visual effects in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and his latest feature further demonstrates his SFX and design mastery. He employed a phenomenal 13 specialist FX companies, whose hundreds of credit names take up many minutes at the end of the movie.

Johnston puts production funds where they count, also hiring top-rate actors to boost the lightweight script. Chris (Fantastic Four) Evans has classic Hollywood pairings of good looks and twinkling eyes, all-American heroics and good-mannered modesty. His Captain America, a weedy lad transformed Atlas-like into a supermanic hunk, is a live cartoon that's very humanly animated. The role of his similarly-engineered arch foe, Red Skull, was entrusted to an actor whose voice and strut grandly inhabit a nonstriking physique: Australian Hugo Weaving, who's segued remarkably from The Adventures of Priscilla to The Matrix and the LOTR series, while adding off-screen timbre to Rex in Babe and Megatron for Transformers.

The Captain's military commander is a gruff ally, played with similar panache to Rambo's (Richard Crenna) by Tommy Lee Jones. The love interest, an English WW2 intelligence agent, is a token role smartly posed by Hayley (Pillars of the Earth) Atwell. There are various well-acted buddies; Stanley Tucci delivers a classy cameo as the obligatory anti-Nazi German emigre boffin.

It will be interesting to compare this beguiling blockbuster with the one that Jon (Iron Man) Favreau made instead, Cowboys & Aliens. It'll be even more astonishing to see how Marvel copes with putting a clutch of its extra-large comic-book eggs (and egos) in one basket when Joss Wheldon's The Avengers appears in 2012, teaming up Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow and Hawkeye under the command of Nick Fury.