Captain America, Hydra and Red Skull: How "Fans" Mix Up Media

"METAPHORICALLY!
I'M ACTUALLY GOING TO START
WEARING DISCO CLOTHES AND
CALLING MYSELF 'NOMAD'!"
(Captain America #176)

As far as I know, there was a bit of a teacup storm recently in the comic book world about a "plot twist" in a recent Captain America comic which claimed that Cap is, and always has been, an undercover Hydra agent. Now I don't read any of the current Captain America comics (I believe this was in a series that is specifically about Steve Rogers in particular because Falcon is currently the "Captain America" in the main comic series) and I don't read them for two reasons:

Reason 1 (Stronger Reason): I don't think modern superhero comics are very good. I stopped reading shortly before the end of the extremely pointless "Avengers vs X-Men" and thus shortly before the start of the "Marvel Now" 2012 "soft reboot".

Reason 2 (Very Weak Reason): I don't like the way they changed Cap's costume. Sure, wings on his head, scale armour and swashbuckler boots are a bit silly, but he's a superhero for goodness' sake. Putting him in a "realistic" or practical costume (ie lots of straps and segmented padding, apparently) while retaining the big "A" on the forehead, the chest star and the red, white and blue scheme seems ridiculous; you may as well just put him in camo.

As such, I haven't actually read this comic, but I have read a synopsis of it, and I've seen the relevant panels online. It didn't sound very interesting, but that's not the point. I understand that some people found this objectionable for two reasons:

Reason 1: It's a cliché lazy plot twist: "The hero is secretly a bad guy! Please be shocked!"

Reason 2: It means Captain America is a "Nazi".

Eight issues (less than a year) later...
(Captain America #184)

Now I don't really have a problem with either of these complaints, and I'll explain why.

Reason 1 (lazy plot twist): This is just fair enough, isn't it? The superhero comic book industry is in its protracted death throes. Maybe they could try to save it by writing comics that had value in themselves and weren't essentially just pieces of merchandise for more successful film properties, but that would require more effort than is necessary to take a little profit from the noisy and critical, but ultimately addicted, fanbase. There's no incentive to do anything else, because comic books these days are mostly just read by hardcore fans, and no matter how much hardcore fans complain, generally they still buy the comics. As such, an attention-grabbing twist like "Cap's a Hydra agent" is sure to provide that thin trickle of interest the small comic-buying market needs to continue to die with indignity.

Reason 2 (Cap is a Nazi): At first I was dubious about this claim; aren't Hydra different to the Nazis in both the original comics books (the continuity of which I believe current Marvel comic books still generally follow, despite the soft reboot of 2012) and the cinematic universe? Then I looked into it in a bit more depth and found out that, as a general rule, Hydra have been pretty closely associated with the Nazis in the comics despite some stories trying to embellish Hydra by claiming that they have existed since ancient times (a sort of "Dan Brown effect" I don't really like). Similarly, for a long time I thought that Red Skull was, in the comics, not a member of Hydra (although he was definitely a Nazi); I thought he was just someone who used Hydra connections (as well as AIM) for his own purposes from time to time. Turns out I was wrong; Red Skull has, on occasion, operated as a member of Hydra and led divisions of Hydra, although as far as I know he was never really in charge of the whole organisation. In the films, of course, HYDRA (as opposed to "Hydra" of the comics) broke away from the Nazis, but they were sponsored by them, and film-universe Red Skull, even if he didn't really believe in the message compared to his own weird philosophy, seems to have still been a high-ranking member of the SS. So if people want to say "Hydra are basically the Nazis", that's broadly reasonable.

Similarly, if people find it objectionable that Cap is, in this storyline, basically a "Nazi" when his creators were Jewish and the character himself is meant to stand for all that's "not Nazi", then fair play to you I suppose. I mean obviously some of the reactions have been completely over-the-top and ridiculous (like death threats and things) but if people find a legitimate grievance with it then that's their prerogative. I was more annoyed to discover the 2012-onwards retcon that Cap's father was an abusive alcoholic. Really? Even Cap needs to have had a bad childhood now? His parents already died young, what more do you need?

Proper supervillain behaviour.
(Captain America #184)

I read an article recently that claimed that fans complaining about this twist and similar franchises were pressuring the current makers too much and treating the properties like they owned them. I can see the point of view, but that's the nature of franchises; the owners are the ones who want things to stay the same, so someone who writes a superhero comic book for Marvel or DC would have to be pretty deluded if they thought that their employers were going to let them make major changes to the characters they were hired to write; the fans in that sense are irrelevant. They're just hired to produce pieces of product to turn a profit, not to be game-changing works of art. I'm not saying that superhero comics shouldn't be game-changing works of art, just that it's the people with the money who aren't interested in them being that way. Possessive, status-quo-obsessed fans are annoying, but blaming them is blaming the wrong people; the ones with the money and power should be blamed.

Anyway, none of this is want I really meant to talk about. What I wanted to talk about was how people were using the history of Captain America to try to make arguments for and against this change; here's my chance to seem like a possessive Captain America weirdo.

The odd thing I noticed in the arguments I read was this: an argument would often follow in this fashion:

Affirmative: Captain America being in Hydra doesn't mean he's a Nazi.

Negative: But Hydra are basically the Nazis.

Affirmative: Please provide evidence for this statement.

Negative: Well, in the film Captain America: The First Avengers/episode X of Agents of SHIELD/whatever...

Or from the other side:

Affirmative: Captain America being in Hydra means he's a Nazi.

Negative: But remember the bit in Captain America: The First Avenger when Red Skull disses the Nazis in the following fashion...?

See the problem here? The "Captain America in Hydra" twist is in the comic book, yet a lot of people were trying to prove that Hydra were or were not basically Nazis by using the films and TV shows as evidence. Now remember, I'm not saying that Hydra aren't basically Nazis in the comic books, just that people were using evidence from the films and TV shows, which follow their own independent storyline, to prove something about the comics.

I'm being pedantic, but shouldn't I expected a little more pedantry from the nerds of the internet? I thought nerds were meant to be pedantic. This happens when people discuss things like The Lord of the Rings as well; people sometimes quote things from the films as evidence of something in the book, but that doesn't work, because even if something is true in both the book and the film adaptations, they aren't the same thing, and one can't be used as evidence for the other.

I beg your pardon?
(Captain America #185)

As far as Captain America is concerned it's particularly dodgy, because when it comes to Hydra and the Nazis, the films and the comic books tend to disagree. Let's see...

Comic books: Hydra was founded after the war by former Axis types (with the head honcho ultimately being Baron Strucker) and developed goals of world domination.

Films and TV: HYDRA was founded during the war by the Red Skull and went rogue from the Nazis, with goals of world domination.

Okay, so both versions want world domination, but their history and association with various Nazi supervillains is a bit different. Let's check out the different versions of Red Skull while we're at it:

Comic books: Red Skull is a very high-ranking Nazi officer whose work involved trying to win the war for the German Reich using terrorism and crazy superweapons (to an even more ridiculous extent than the real Nazis did this anyway). When he was revived after the war he at times worked as a Hydra operative and led parts of Hydra but his motives were mostly his own Nazi ones. Check out the comics from the 60s and 70s. Red Skull cares way more about Nazism than he does Hydra. He only appears to support Hydra's ideology insofar as it corroborates with his own agenda.

Films and TV: Red Skull was a high-ranking Nazi officer who founded Hydra during the war and led it away from the Nazis towards its own independent Hydra-ish goals of world domination. He says 'Hail Hydra' a lot, talks about Hydra as if it's his favourite thing in the world, and thinks the Nazis are actually a bit shit. He accidentally disintegrated himself using the Tesseract in 1945 and hasn't been seen or heard from since.

What are they standing in front of? The sun?
(Captain America #185)

Incidentally, if you're wondering about the fate of the comic book Red Skull, he died in Captain America #600 in 2009; I believe the current iteration is his clone. He'll come back to life eventually. That's another good reason not to read current comics; either kill Red Skull permanently or bring the real one back. Half-arseing it with a clone is another example of cliché comic book laziness.

In any event, trying to argue something about comic book Hydra using film Red Skull doesn't really work because you're using a character from a completely different text with completely different motivations. I also see people saying "Well film Red Skull isn't a Nazi" and then people respond "Oh yeah? Let me show you my evidence from a comic book." And not a film tie-in comic book, a normal Marvel mainstream universe comic book - which therefore is totally irrelevant to the characterisation in the films.

Has the calibre of nerd-dom sunk so low that nerds can't tell their comic book universes apart from their film universes, or think they're interchangeable? Or are people just desperate to appear correct on the internet and will use whatever evidence they can muster, however shaky? Let's face it, it's the latter. On the plus side, I have seen people actually using evidence from the comic books to argue that Hydra are or are not Nazis in the comics, so not everyone is making this inexplicable error, but it's still too prevalent for my comfort.

Red Skull: King of the Comeback
(Captain America #186)

The situation also bothers me because it suggests people think that the films are basically just straight-up representations of the comic books, when actually the films shuffle ideas from the comics around a lot. People risk missing out on a lot of potentially interesting ideas if they just follow the films, and it's worth looking into old comics to see how these ideas first manifested and get away from this film-dominated view of these stories.

For instance, here's what I would have done with Red Skull in the films: For whatever reason, in the films HYDRA basically replace the "Germans" as the enemy about halfway through. I'm not sure why this is; it can't be to avoid European censorship, because they show swastikas and Nazi paraphernalia earlier. It's possibly to avoid seeming like they were making a statement like "We needed a superman to win the war; our own soldiers were a bit shit." They could have avoided this by having Cap fight Axis supervillains (like Red Skull himself, who had superpowers in the film that he generally hasn't had in the comics), but they didn't. I actually think there must have been some behind the scenes production issue because the film seems to switch from being a World War Two film with some sci-fi in the first half (with semi-realistic settings, uniforms, weapons etc.) to being a sci-fi film with a bit of World War Two flavour in the second half (laser guns everywhere, over-the-top tanks and bases, HYDRA soldiers look like video game enemies).

Anyway, this is what I would have done, and all this confusion could have been avoided years later (although obviously it still would be meaningless as evidence in the "Cap is in Hydra" debate; it would have just been more interesting): Hydra, or HYDRA, should still have been this oddball "science division" in Nazi Germany, but no one sees them as important; they're just pissing away money and resources, as many of the Nazis' poorly-organised duplicate agencies did (if you think the Nazis were models of efficiency, the opposite is true; they were exemplars of wasteful redundancy, because often when an organisation fell out of Hitler's favour, instead of revamping it to try to meet his demands, however unreasonable, they would just make a new one with the same duties, only using more "in favour" people, and expect the two to compete with each other for favouritism; the regular Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS are a similar, if not identical, case).

"Captain! Stop doing power squats and listen to how
I'm still very much a Nazi even though it's the Seventies!"
(Captain America #184)

So let's say the Eastern Front is starting to look a bit wobbly and they've rather recklessly declared war on the United States and the Nazi leadership are having a big argument about what to do to ensure they win the war. They can't agree on anything; then who should come in but Schmidt, a high-ranking Party "enforcer". He might even throw down his Skull mask on the table as he's literally just come back from a mission, but we possibly don't see his face. We can tell, however, that he's serious business. Even hard-bitten horrible Nazi bastards with monocles and scars on their faces don't want to meet his eye. Red Skull has a solution: those oddballs might be onto something; he says it's time to bring HYDRA into line.

The film then goes more or less as planned, but instead of being the founder and leader of HYDRA, Red Skull is the Nazi enforcer who shows up with his own men and starts bossing around the regular HYDRA leadership (who have been having a jolly good war wasting time and money on weapons prototypes that never get finished, let alone used). Every time HYDRA tries to do anything too independent, Red Skull reigns them in and directs their efforts towards the Nazi war machine. Then we can still have Zola betraying HYDRA (the others all kill themselves because they're scared of Red Skull) and Cap's confrontation with Skull is more thematic to the actual war. In fact the whole conflict feels more like the actual war, without suggesting that the regular armed forces couldn't handle it; we now have Allied superhero versus Axis supervillain, not "Allied superhero versus random HYDRA diversion". Furthermore, it means that when HYDRA reappear in the sequel with their own agenda, it has more impact; before, they were just the Nazis' slaves. In the sequel (perhaps unpleasantly inspired by Red Skull whipping them into shape during the war) they've developed serious ambitions of their own.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. Remember these lessons:

1. You can't use something from one "universe" to try to explain what happens in a completely different "universe".

2. Nerds aren't as stereotypically pedantic as it might appear, and that might actually be a bad thing.

3. With hindsight, it's very easy to think of simple ways the Marvel films could have been dramatically improved.

I don't have a smart arse caption for this. This is what genuinely good comic book writing looks like,
and this was an issue that the bosses actually did muck around with because it was too challenging.
Check out http://www.jmdematteis.com/2012/03/mysterious-michael-ellis.html for more details.
(Captain America #300 by J.M. DeMatteis.)

Auf wiedersehen!

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier"

"Remember kids, the minimum requirement for wearing a helmet
is jumping out of a low-flying aircraft. Don't bother with one when,
say, riding a big heavy motorcycle, for instance."

Ed Brubaker's essential run writing Captain America from 2005 to 2012 was always a prime candidate for adaptation, being one of the most memorable and innovative periods for the character in recent years. Most crucial to this era was Brubaker's resurrection of Cap's long-dead sidekick Bucky as the Winter Soldier, a brainwashed and regularly-hibernated Soviet assassin who had, through conditioning and mind control, operated against his country of origin for many years. He eventually comes into the control of the Red Skull, who has used a Cosmic Cube (the "Tesseract" of the film universe) to cheat death at the last minute by transferring his consciousness into the mind of Russian businessman Aleksander Lukin, the Winter Soldier's current owner, who had in fact been attempting to use the Soldier to kill the Skull himself. In the course of the story Cap encounters his former friend numerous times, finally using the Cosmic Cube to restore Bucky's memory and original personality in order to break his handlers' control over him. In the course of the story, Cap had to confront his past, and eventually Bucky did as well. Featuring Cap, Bucky, Red Skull, Arnim Zola, Sharon Carter, Falcon, Baron Zemo, flashbacks to the war and to long-past Captain America storylines like "Secret Empire" and "The Grand Director" it's a loving tribute to the history of the character as well as shaking up the formula and telling a compelling story of its own. It's a pretty good example of serialised comic book fiction done right.

"Mr Pierce, please stop staring at my massive belt buckle."

I guessed that the second Captain America film would bear the subtitle "The Winter Soldier" and I wasn't wrong. My review of "Captain America: The First Avenger" is more negative than I really feel about that film now. I rewatch it somewhat regularly, and I'm actually very fond of it. As such I was hopeful that "The Winter Soldier" would be a worthy sequel to "The First Avenger." That being said, having seen trailers, I was not entirely optimistic. "The Winter Soldier" looked to me like it was going to be a fairly generic action film, and unfortunately that's more or less exactly what I think it ended up being. As far as sequels go, it's superior in my opinion to "Iron Man 2", not a difficult task, and probably on more or less the same level as "Thor: The Dark World." I thought that "The Dark World" didn't start well but ended reasonably effectively. The opposite is more or less true in this case. In my opinion "The Winter Soldier" has a strong opening act but doesn't sustain it all the way through, and to avoid a disjointed and rambling review, I'll give my feelings on why this is the case first before examining what I thought were the memorable and effective elements of the film.

"Who the Buck is Fu- wait..."

The Winter Soldier

Perhaps the greatest issue I have with the film is that the titular Winter Soldier is introduced too late in the film, isn't given sufficient attention, and never has his narrative resolved in the scope of the on-screen narrative. He first appears as a sinister henchman of Alexander Pierce, the film's main villain, and only after several encounters is revealed to be Bucky, Cap's presumed-deceased friend of decades earlier. This is much like the comics, but a film doesn't have the time allocation a comic series does. We get scraps of backstory - the implication is that in this continuity he was resurrected not by the Soviets but by HYDRA - but by the end of the film, after his confrontation with Steve, he never actually recovers his identity. We don't get any closure on the situation, and it's in fact left hanging for a sequel. Personally I found this to be rather bizarre. Cap doesn't even get much time in the film to attempt to deal with discovering the survival of his friend or the state he has been in for the last seventy years or so. I think that had they focused more on the Winter Soldier himself, perhaps with the revelation of his identity early in the second act rather than at its conclusion, we might have been able to tell a more personal story. It ends up, however, being Cap fighting to save the world rather than to save Bucky, and I feel like the film doesn't play to the strengths of its narrative in that regard. That being said, perhaps it's a story almost impossible to tell effectively in the scope of a single feature film. In addition, straggly longish hair and overgrown stubble really don't suit Sebastian Stan, who deprived of his mask looks a bit like an adolescent who's responding to recently finishing school by rarely shaving or getting a haircut. I would have preferred a more sinister clean-cut look with the original domino mask. The rest of the costume's fine, though, and the bionic arm's done well, although in this adaptation the Soviet star on the shoulder is rather inexplicable.

 

HYDRA

Hello, old sport.

This is my other major objection with the story. The main problem with the storyline as it stands is that instead of simply having it focused on Cap's objections to an increasingly intrusive, paranoid and ruthless SHIELD, this quality has to be attributed instead to HYDRA, the Red Skull's evil organisation from the previous film, which infiltrated SHIELD upon the incorporation of Arnim Zola and others into its power structure. My main issues with this are twofold: firstly in reference to the previous film, where HYDRA seemed to largely be a vehicle for the Red Skull to enact his own rather personal designs of megalomania and where Zola himself seemed to have very little personal investment in the cause, and secondly because I don't think we need a sinister conspiracy for this storyline to work. I actually would have preferred Cap to cut ties with SHIELD because of things SHIELD was doing entirely legitimately. I think this would have given the surveillance issue far more bite than simply attributing an evil scheme to an obviously evil organisation. While I appreciate that HYDRA is an ongoing presence in the actual Marvel comics universe, I also feel that this ties the narrative too closely to the plot of the previous film instead of telling something new. I didn't like the idea that HYDRA was responsible for things like Howard Stark's death, and generally thought the betrayal from within was a bit of a cliché, not unlike Stane's betrayal of Stark in "Iron Man". It all seemed excessively orchestrated. It also limits the impact of the Winter Soldier's already truncated storyline. I think it would have been more interesting to see Cap dealing with how the random accumulation of events can cause a situation to spiral out of control. It probably owes something to the "Secret Empire" storyline of the 70s, but that was effective because it tapped into America's anxiety about its own leadership after Watergate by implying that the President himself was the real villain. Using fictional organisations like SHIELD and HYDRA instead of the US Government, the Soviets and so on makes the story feel a bit toothless in my opinion, sort of like HYDRA substituting for the actual Nazis in the previous film. Pierce isn't a very memorable villain to my mind, and with Winter Soldier as just a stooge I would have preferred a proper Cap villain like Baron Zemo or Strucker, who appeared altogether distinctively and memorably in the mid-credits sequence, as someone against whom Cap could face off.

Hopefully he's getting too old for this.

Supporting Cast

At times this film feels more like "Avengers One and a Half." We have Cap, Black Widow, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, SHIELD agents and the introduction of new characters Falcon and Agent 13. Pierce is observed to be a character basically outranking Nick Fury who has an enforcer loosely based on the Crossbones character from the comic, which almost makes the Winter Soldier feel unnecessary. Black Widow is okay as a supporting character for Cap, but given her presence in the film Falcon seems a bit redundant, Hill moreso. Poor old Scarlett Johansson sadly has to slip back into the same tight catsuit, a bad wig and the familiar old role of being exploited on film with, for example, an egregious posterior shot and an even more egregious bosom shot that comes out of nowhere towards the end. While the character works effectively as a foil for Cap, at times I found her exasperatingly dry. Falcon's fine, but doesn't undergo much development, and as I've said feels a touch redundant, and his storyline helping other retired soldiers deal with civilian life doesn't seem to pay off much. Robin, I mean Maria Hill, seems basically there for the sake of someone to operate the computer at the end, and there's a missed opportunity for some Bechdel-passing dialogue between her and Widow. As for Nick Fury, I could do without him. I feel like we're meant to think that Samuel L. Jackson is this cool "badass" but frankly I find him typecast and dull. The most underutilised presence is undoubtedly Emily VanCamp as Agent 13. She's set up as Cap's new love interest but never really gets to do anything. Poor Hayley Atwell also has to get slathered in old lady makeup in a cliché old, bedridden scene with Steve. Some of these characters probably needed to be dropped to give the others room to breathe.

General Constructive Comments

CANNONBAAAALL!

The film in my opinion is just too busy. I don't think we have enough time to show Cap dealing with modern life, which already didn't get that much time in "The Avengers", or to introduce Falcon and establish his relationship with Cap, deal with SHIELD being taken over by HYDRA, give the numerous other secondary protagonists much attention and deal with what's notionally the film's chief focus, the Winter Soldier. As I've said, I would have largely dropped the SHIELD elements - at times it feels like "SHIELD: The Film" - and presented a more personal story for Cap about his efforts to find his place in the modern world, having to deal with the revival of his friend as a mindless killer. Otherwise, I would have just had Cap dealing with SHIELD. I think the film tries to have two main plots and in the end the more interesting one, the Winter Soldier, gets shafted for the more ticket-selling one, the action extravaganza of a SHIELD civil war. There are too many interchangeable urban action scenes, the ending is a pretty routine CGI-'em-up with three giant airships firing hundreds of shots at each other and it feels too constrained to the SHIELD Triskelion. The pacing is too frantic, eschewing more opportunities for breathing room which I think would have made things more poignant. This is a film which tries to do too much and ends up unfulfilled in each element. And seriously, how many times have we seen movie terrorists cause big multi-car pileups on highways? And what's with the bit where Steve calls out HYDRA over the radio? Didn't he consider that publicly announcing to the loyal SHIELD agents what was going on would probably start a massive, confused, treacherous battle where loads of them would get killed? The evacuation shot where crowds are running in three different directions like headless chickens was pretty risible too.

Well that's enough of what I thought didn't work in the film. So what did I like?

The Opening and other quiet moments

I thought the film started quite well. I liked that we started with Cap himself and I felt like Falcon was introduced effectively. I thought Washington was a visually unique setting and I enjoyed Cap visiting the Smithsonian exhibit, as well as the general feeling of his efforts to live in the modern world. The film was actually most successful, I think, in the scenes shot in the evening, which I felt gave the environment a particular atmosphere equivalent to some degree to the historical setting of the previous film. I quite liked the part where Cap and Widow went to the Apple store to investigate their information, even if the product placement was pretty blatant, and the scene in the car where Steve and Natasha were driving out to Camp Lehigh was a massively important piece of, as I keep saying, breathing room in a film with an enormous quantity of action scenes. In this regard I appreciated the moments where Steve seemed alone or isolated, relying on his convictions where the authorities and hierarchy had failed.

"Uh... it was you."

Captain America himself

In 2011 I thought that Chris Evans was well-cast as Captain America, and this film didn't change that opinion. Captain America is portrayed as a sincere, decent, moral person in a world gone mad with similar effectiveness to the previous film and once again Chris Evans provided a believable sense of a humble, self-deprecating character whose greatest strengths are his loyalty to his own aforementioned convictions and his ability to bring out that side in others. He has a good rapport with the rest of the cast, and I think that his scenes were almost always the strongest. He provides a solid, dependable core to the film much like the Captain himself.

Arnim Zola

Apart from the other scenes I've mentioned, one of my favourite moments in the film was when Cap and Widow discover the enormous 1970s-style old fashioned computer room where the intelligence of Arnim Zola was stored. Not only was this scene incredibly atmospheric, it also paid homage to the character's nature in the comics in an interesting way that wasn't managed in the previous film. I appreciated both the design and, despite the implausibility of the situation, the realistically huge amount of antiquated technology implied to be necessary to achieve something that the film depicts in modern times with holograms and clouds of light out of nowhere.

Essential Line

The exchange:

"Bucky?"

"Who the hell is 'Bucky'?"

is mandatory dialogue from the original comic so I'm glad it was retained in this.

Sky Captain meets The Spirit?

"Captain America: The Winter Soldier" isn't a terrible film but I think it's a film which doesn't recognise its own strengths and suffers as a result. As objectionable as many would find this complaint, there's too much action, or the action scenes are too repetitious. The attack on Fury on the streets, for instance, feels too similar to the attack on Cap, Widow and Falcon later in the film. The airborne finale feels too similar to the finale of the first film. This is a film which would have benefited from a deeper focus on a smaller cast, greater selectivity of narrative, and more moderated pacing to allow for moments of introspection. I often complain about modern cinema and TV prioritising character too far ahead of plot. This is a film which puts plot too far ahead of character. It's a little cold and lacking atmosphere except in the few scenes I already mentioned, the ending is a bit "forced climax" and too routine as a big battle full of CGI explosions. My opinion on the first film changed as well, so I'm prepared to change my mind about this one, but at the moment I'm not convinced that it's much more than a fairly generic action film or that it really lives up to the praise it has thus far received elsewhere.