Joe Johnston's knightly take on the most jingoistic fictional icon the side of Uncle Sam stands out in this season of craptacular comic-book movies for two basic reasons: 1) it has some modicum of heart; and 2) holy hell the rest of the field has sucked balls. The minds behind the arrogant and boring Thor, the mechanical Green Lantern and the stilted X-Men: First Class should all take notes on the director’s battle plan for simple superhuman success — an approachable mix of action, cornball humor and characters you might actually care about.

Set, in step with the hero's print origins, in the thick of World War II, Captain America centers on sickly Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a wannabe enlistee who possesses the fight and valor of a supersoldier but none of the physical attributes to make him an asset to the Allies. Enter the avuncular Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), who injects Rogers with a serum that swells him up from shrimp to shield-chucking specimen. Though he's first used as a domestic propagandist to drum up war bond sales, commanding officers (including an expertly dispatched Tommy Lee Jones) realize his wartime value after he singlehandedly rescues hundreds of POWs from the clutches of HYDRA, a persistent Nazi fringe faction led by the delightfully cheesy Red Skull (Hugo Weaving).

Though there's more than a little setup for the impending Avengers franchise (note the focus on Dominic Cooper as Henry Stark, aka Iron Man's pappy), Captain America works as standalone entertainment due to its sincerity — it never attempts to overreach, and Evans' corn-fed charms are put to wisest use.