'Captain America: The First Avenger' review by Captain Raptor

'Captain America: The First Avenger' review by Jake Boyle

For somebody who spends about 10% of every day gushing about how much I love Marvel, it's a personal failing that it's taken me over three years to watch any of the Captain America films. The character's never appealed me, due to nauseating patriotism and a pretty uninteresting backstory, but his appearance in Avengers Assemble and a delightful cameo in Thor: The Dark World has made it clear that I should at least give him a try.

The crucial difference between Cap's first solo outing and the films mentioned above is humour, or namely the former's lack of it. While Chris Evans delivers every droll comeback he's given with perfect capability, there's not a lot of humour to sustain the film through it's most familiar and generic moments, which there are more than a few of. The initial transformation from an eager but scrawny scarecrow of a figure (the CGI used to shrink Chris Evans down to such a meagre build are fantastic) to the beefed up superhero is done smartly, pushing its 'anybody can be a hero' message just shy of breaking point, but once he is combat ready, things get less interesting. The Marvel Cinematic Universe's previous outings, barring the equally underwhelming The Incredible Hulk, compensated for similar problems with humour, charisma and style, but there's only a small amount of these to be found here. The action sequences aren't fantastic either - a fighting style predominantly built around shield-based combat doesn't leave you with a multitude of options - but they're done competently enough. It would have been nice to see one or two more of them, especially given a disappointing segment where the film's entire military campaign finale is mostly reduced to a montage.

The First Avenger isn't just a dumb action flick though, possessing evident smarts through its visual jokes (Cap using a taxi door with a star logo in the centre as a shield, Arnim Zola's face initially appearing onscreen as a holographic projection) and the mind-over-muscle mentality of its hero, although he does certainly find more than a few uses for muscle too. Gratifyingly, the patriotism has been reigned in to a degree where it can't really irritate, but one could argue that this defeats one of the major points to the character. The action is often a little reliant on explosions, and they don't appear to have been spectacularly rendered for such a big budget movie. It's a fairly well-written movie, with dialogue that isn't especially memorable but certainly isn't clunky or overly po-faced. The performances are all up to scratch all round, but nobody's particularly excellent, apart from the eternally sardonic Tommy Lee Jones, who doesn't exactly try very hard, but an actor of his calibre doesn't really need to in order to give an entertaining performance.

Captain America: The First Avenger is a moderately entertaining but pretty forgettable movie, especially when compared to its other Marvel brethren. It feels more like a weak attempt to replicate Indiana Jones (handsome professional Nazi-puncher tracking down a mysterious MacGuffin) than a superhero movie, and nothing else about the film has anything particularly definitive or original. In most regards, the film is so-so, with a few elements being less successful and even fewer being better. Avengers Assemble proves that Captain America can be funny and engaging whilst remaining true to the all-American hero of the comic books. This film does not.

'The Inbetweeners 2' review by Captain Raptor

'The Inbetweeners 2' review by Jake Boyle

Forget grieving families, starving children and oppressed minorities. True struggle is being a British teenager who thinks that The Inbetweeners is a little bit shit. My life is hard. If you're somebody who takes an opposing view on the boys from Rudge Park (which, demographically speaking, is possibly all of you) this might be a review to skip. Not that I think The Inbetweeners 2 is bad, exactly, but I'm likely going to be fairly insulting to its fan base. Sorry, snobbery never rests.

That said, I do think it's kind of bad. The immaturity is demonstrably self-aware, but there's still not enough smarts on display to pacify the increasingly grating stupidity of some of the humour. I probably shouldn't have high expectations for a franchise in which the most popular joke is putting a variety of words in front of 'wanker', but by the time a guy with a faeces-covered face starts projectile vomiting, it's hard not to feel that it's hit a new low. Aside from being actively puerile, some of the jokes simply aren't funny - Will and Simon repeatedly shouting "grow up" at each other quickly descends from dull to actively irritating, and Jay's graphic and obviously false stories about the sex he's having got old by the end of the first series. There's some good moments surrounding all of this - reliably dimwitted Neil is as entertaining as ever, in particular during an incident involving a dolphin, and Simon being forced to deal with a lunatic girlfriend allows him to display some highly amusing exasperation. But a comedy where a third of the jokes don't make me laugh, and a further third of them actually annoy me is taking more than a few steps down the wrong path.

The performances are all fine, if perhaps slightly lazier than in past installments. There's dabblings with character development, although some of it is the same character development from the first film, only more so. The boys still remain (in my opinion) as mildly loathsome prats, but the comedy is mostly at their expense, so there's not much need to feel any sympathy for them. Towards the end, there are a few more tender moments, even reaching towards heartfelt, that I'm sure would have made an impact on somebody who actually likes The Inbetweeners. A problem with the film - especially noticeable when one is attempting to construct a review of it - is that there's nothing to the film without the jokes. Other comedies, both better and worse, tend to contain stories, character arcs, maybe even some messages and beliefs at their core. Any of those that can temporarily be glimpsed whilst watching this have all definitely faded by the end, and that's a notable drawback to somebody who didn't think the things that were there were particularly funny.

Unwise as it is of me to point this out, a review of The Inbetweeners 2 seems fairly pointless. If you liked what has come before, you'll probably like this one. If you didn't, you probably won't. It's more of the same with enough unexplored territory (both in dialogue and in geographical terms) that it's suitably original. I sort-of liked it, but I sort-of liked the first film more. More than anything else I think this suggests it's time to pack it in and quit while they're (relatively) ahead; the actors are mostly in their thirties, there's only so many times you can get laughs from using assorted synonyms for 'vagina', and the law of diminishing returns is gently rapping, rapping at the chamber door.