Kudos: Nineteen year-old British actor Tom Holland takes a pretty decent Marvel movie to a higher level of fun. With the help of a spot-on Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Holland busts out a vexatious yet wholesome new version of the decidedly non-Marvel Spider Man. He’s an oasis in the take-itself seriously Marvel desert.
Complaint: Was the uneven Luc Bresson film Lucy the closest we are going to get to a Scarlet Johansson Black Widow star-turn movie (even though of course Lucy wasn’t even Black Widow except in spirit, and, partially, in her powers) Underutilization continues to plague the Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow character in this, Scarlet Johansson’s fourth Marvel project.
Kudos: Continuing to be the coolest mainstream actor going, Downey has the lines here that bring to mind his stellar performances in the first Iron Man and first Avengers films. While he’s never bad, part of the problem with Avengers: Age of Ultron was Tony seemed to be going through the motions a little too much.
Complaint: It may be true Black Widow deserves her own movie on the heels of the projected 2017 release of a new Spiderman with Holland and a projected 2018 film featuring Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), who is introduced here. Yet in its haste to bring us new characters and round up all the old ones except Hulk and Thor, this produces essentially an Avengers 3 instead of a new Captain America. Cap himself (Chris Evans) also gets shortchanged. In his own movie.
Kudos: The scene where the Stark forces and the Cap forces battle it out on the airport Tarmac is rather exciting action movie stuff, even if it did take another Spider Man-style interloper to juice things up further. Here it is the equally jovial Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) in a brief but effective appearance.
Complaint: Elizabeth Olsen will will forever be on my favorite performance list if for no other film than Martha Marcy May Marlene. It’s not Olsen’s fault that her Scarlet Witch character is mostly a befuddling mess. Either she has supernatural powers that usurp the rest of the collected crew or she doesn’t: you can’t have it both ways.
Kudos: The irrepressible William Hurt, often a master of overacting, actually contributes the proper air of bureaucratic stiffness required of his character Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross. When Hurt blurts warnings about the requisite government oversight needed to overrun The Avengers’ antics, it not only sets up the looming tension between the libertarian Cap and the guilt-ridden Stark, but his words and mannerisms also come off like what a character with a bag-of-wind name like Thaddeus would actually sound like.
Complaint: Leaving aside Hurt, the rest of the ancillary characters leave a lot to be desired. Baron Zemo (Daniel Bruhl) is a very vanilla villain, Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) provides Cap with his first on-screen smooch and little else; and, as much as I admire them both, Marisa Tomei (as Spider Man’s mom) and John Slattery (as Stark’s dad) also add only slightly more than their prestigious names to the proceedings.
Kudos: What better bad guy to hold our attention than a charismatic, actually non-villain superhero fighting against another superhero like himself?
Complaint: Memo to The Marvel Movie Gods: Captain America: Civil War mostly gets it right, but now that you’ve beaten this horse to death, can you skip the superhero-vs.-superhero next time and give us real, honest-to-God villains again?