Underneath all that spandex underwear and glitzy party tricks, somber brooding seems to be the default setting for modern superheroes. You might be able to heft a car on your shoulders like it was a Hello Kitty backpack, or move oceans with a shift of your eyes, but apparently daddy issues and adolescent alienation can still keep you from feeling super inside. Perhaps that’s why the off-the-cuff, whiffing banter of Ryan Reynold’s Deadpool proved refreshing to audiences tired of taking their heroes so deathly serious, and conversely, why, regardless of the box-office, Batman v Superman landed with such a thud on the emotional level.
Consider it another Marvel hat-trick then that Captain America: Civil War finds a way to make us accept serious superheroes while simultaneously indulging in the kind of goofy, hair brained skirmishes that have delighted comic readers since the heyday of the medium. Sure, Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man spends most of his time pensively glowering like the hipster version of Julius Cesar and Chris Evans’ Cap throws many a watery stare to the mid-distance while banging a fool’s jaw with his shield, but this time through some of that angst is even warranted, and more importantly, balanced out with a sense of joy.
Liberally—and wisely—adapted from the comic plot-line of the same name, Civil War briefly backs off the Marvel thread-building towards the Infinity War and decides instead to tell a story that, more or less, opens and closes within the confines of this film. Coming off several world-threatening disasters, all of which have left some devastating collateral damage, the super-powered Avengers find themselves singled out and put on notice by Earth’s governments. Headed up by the ever surly Thaddeus ‘Thunderbolt’ Ross (William Hurt reprising his Incredible Hulk role), the Sakovia Accords are a treaty calling for governmental oversight and accountability when it comes to known superheroes. Some, led by an increasingly conflicted and haunted Tony Stark, sign the Accords, while others like Steve Rogers fear what form and method their practical application will take. Muddying already murky water is the re-appearance of Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), the ‘Winter Soldier’, Cap’s childhood friend turned Hydra assassin.
Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley incorporate a boatload of subplots, themes and tones into Civil War, while also doing enough box-ticking to keep the Marvel fleet afloat. Once Bucky becomes the primary target of a manhunt after the Vienna summit is hit by a tragic terrorist attack, the film is off to the races, allowing the competing ideologies of its heroes to take a back-seat to the physical beat-downs that result from their convictions. And there are a lot of heroes here. Even after picking up Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), Vision (Paul Bettany) and Ant Man (Paul Rudd) after last year’s slate, Civil War still finds time to add-in the latest and best iteration of Spiderman (Tom Holland), and long-time-coming hero T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the Black Panther, a fierce but principled warrior who brings a real dramatic energy to the table. The focus does inevitably come down to those long-term seasoned veterans; Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and Rhodey (Don Cheadle) take their respective places across the battle lines drawn between Evans’ Rogers and Downey Jr’s Stark.
Walking that tightrope between developing plausible characters and stage-managing a multi-faceted comic storyline is something directors Joe and Anthony Russo demonstrated a particular strength for when helming Winter Soldier a few years back. Here they cement themselves as MVPs of Marvel’s brand of storytelling, folding in both the witty and idiosyncratic with what those of us experiencing comic fatigue would call ‘boilerplate’. This is a film that takes its characters very seriously without making the tone itself overtly serious. The Russos deftly evoke the visual texture of comic-reading through nuanced, stylish scene construction and some very effective title cards; knowing viewers cheered when ‘Queens’ appeared on screen in giant, welcoming letters. The hard-hitting crunch-and-munch of the film’s first chase scene creates the aural equivalent of comic-book ‘whams!’ and ‘blams!’, while a hilariously off-the-cuff moment between Bucky and Sam uses traditional filmmaking cues to create the best adaptation of comic panel timing I’ve seen.
When it comes to the action scenes, the Russos do what they can to add a directorial stamp to the rather conventional visual universe these films all share in common. For a movie that wants to deal with the fallout from all of these epic set-pieces, Civil War does manage to ever-so-slightly shrink the scope and cataclysm of its action beats, reducing the number of participants and enhancing the individual and personal stakes. This is particularly true of the final confrontation at the film’s end, which involves another case of heroic types trading blows when a few probing questions and well-placed time-outs might have avoided them altogether. The viewpoints of Steve Rogers and Tony Stark are well-drawn and convincingly espoused by Evans and Downey Jr., but the stances of both, Cap in particular, are questionable in a way the film itself never quite gets around to questioning. Incidentally, the one moment where the Russos do go big while letting go of their ideological questions is the one that also ends up being the biggest crowd-pleaser; the all-hero throw-down at an empty airport involving every manner of super-power stand-off you could possibly imagine.
In this scene, Civil War stops feeling like a compressed season of a TV series and starts playing with the same verve and energy of a really great comic issue. Seeing Holland’s Spidey merrily swinging across the top of an airport lobby while cracking-wise is every bit as joyous as watching a star-struck Scott Lang pull off a major transformation just to impress his more famous team-mates. As flexible and versatile as Scott’s shrinking/growing hero, Civil War itself knows when to draw the curtain and darken the mood and when to let in a little light and revel in the simple excitement of seeing all these characters interact with one another. Although they have little to do with any of the bigger fights or thornier political commentaries, my favorite moments involve Bettany’s Vision, clad in a turtle-neck and getting cozy in the kitchen with Olsen’s Scarlet Witch, who has a more extensive character exploration here than she did in Age of Ultron. Boseman’s T’Challa may have limited screen-time and background, but he makes the most of a simple but complete arc that carries him through this film and effectively teases Ryan Coogler’s solo Black Panther movie. In Holland, Marvel has finally found a Spiderman who perfectly embodies his comic namesake.
The real strength of Civil War over many of the recent superhero entries—from both Marvel and DC—is that it effectively weaves all its competing elements together into something that feels both living and cohesive. Instead of playing as a giant trailer for the next film, Civil War finds immediate and compelling things for Stark, Rogers and the others to do, and here the Russo brothers give the actors latitude to cheerfully create the mindscape of these characters in a way we haven’t quite experienced before. When John Favreau gave us that disarming moment at the end of the original Iron Man, with Tony openly advertising his secret identity, it created a set of expectations that, at least from this fan perspective, was never quite cashed in on. With Civil War, we’ve just come one step closer to seeing these Marvel cinematic entries as individual, literate stories and not just million-dollar links in a financial daisy chain. That, alone, qualifies as a big win for fans, and something Cap and Iron Man could equally agree on.
Captain America: Civil War is now playing in wide release.
