Quartile rating: 4.5/10 · 1 rating
During World War II, a brave, patriotic American Soldier undergoes experiments to become a new supersoldier, "Captain America". Racing to Germany to sabotage the rockets of Nazi baddie "Red Skull", Captain America winds up frozen until the 1990s. He reawakens to find that the Red Skull has changed identities and is now planning to kidnap the President of the United States.
The 1990 Captain America is a notoriously low-budget, poorly executed adaptation of the Marvel character. The plot is a serviceable comic-book premise but handled clumsily, with jarring tonal shifts and a meandering second act once Cap thaws in the modern era. Acting is genuinely poor across the board — Matt Salinger is wooden and unconvincing as Steve Rogers, and the supporting cast fares little better, making this a clear below-average performance category. Cinematography is flat and cheap-looking, typical of low-budget straight-to-video productions of the era. Novelty is limited; while superhero films were still rare in 1990, the execution is formulaic and derivative of earlier B-movie action films rather than offering anything distinctive. The ending is especially weak — the final confrontation with Red Skull is anticlimactic and unsatisfying, failing to deliver on even basic genre expectations.