Captain America

Captain America manages to be the most straightforward unironic of the Marvel film adaptations and it works much better than I would have expected. The Captain doesn't have any of the angst or recklessness of most other superheroes, he just wants to go out and kill some Nazis. I think this is the right approach, because when you're main character is named after a country and runs around with a shield its going to be difficult to sell that he's secretly tortured. Anyway, even though I'm getting tired of origin stories the film was generally well executed, and had a nice sense of humor about itself to go along with the lack of irony. The Cap isn't as compelling as Iron Man, but he's way more interesting than the Hulk, and I'll be interested to see what Joss Whedon does with all these characters in the Avengers.

All that said, and possible spoilers ahead (actually definite spoilers ahead), the action scenes don't always hold up to scrutiny, and the ending in particular lacks any semblance of sense it almost serves to derail the whole operation. Dig This. So if you're flying a bomb loaded plane that's hurtling out of control for NYC and you don't have time to find a safe landing area, where do you think you'd end up crashing the plane? Somewhere in the Atlantic? Possibly Maine? Boston? I mean, you literally only have seconds to make a decision so obviously you must be super close to new york? Right? Wrong. Apparently the Captain didn't have time to find a corn field, but he did have time to fly to the freaking North Pole to crash and then be frozen for the next sixty years. Right, if you're trying to convince us that he doesn't have enough time to even finish a radio conversation with his girlfriend but he does have time to fly 5,000 miles out of the way then you should probably rethink your story execution. Whatever, shut up brain.