Big Bad III: In CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE PYUN CUT, Love It Or Hate It, This One’s For The Fans
The work of adapting comic book, video game and toy properties nearly forty years ago wasn’t without its usual controversies. Fans didn’t have the internet to galvanize masses angry enough to wage whole campaigns to “cancel” something they didn’t like. Aside from whatever the critics had to say, moviegoers either liked it, or didn’t.
Regardless, this didn’t stop directors from taking whatever liberties they thought were viable enough to enact their vision, and director Albert Pyun’s 1990 iteration of Marvel Comics property, Captain America, wouldn’t be the first project to get the same treatment. It’s been put through the wringer, for sure, but it’s also built a cult following of sorts – enthusiasts who’ve especially taken a foothold in celebration of its director who sadly passed away in 2022 – the production’s beleagured history and results notwithstanding.
That support eventually garnered a second version of the film, clocked in at almost two hours from Pyun’s surviving 35-mm negative print, re-edited and reworked within its story sequences to establish flashbacks throughout the film as it progresses. In this instance, the film introduces a young child snaps a photo while witnessing Steve Rogers a la Captain America (Matt Salinger) himself averting crisis, deflects a missle aimed at the White House, before crashing into a bed of ice in Alaska and being frozen in stasis for the next fifty years.
Fifty years, later, that young boy is President Tom Kimball (Ronny Cox), whose environmental policies have since made him a target of the Red Skull (Scott Paulin), a supervillain whose facial appearance is matched only by the tortuous past he suffered as a child, and his subsequent agenda in the years ahead as a rising force of terror that eventually led to his first battle with Captain America.
The film frequently flashes back to some of these earlier story moments while spending its concurrent story following Rogers as he awakens from stasis, on the run from the Red Skull’s Nazi assassins. He soon manages to hike his way to his old neighborhood and reconnecting with his since-married former wartime girlfriend, Bernice (Kim Gillingham), and is offered a place to stay with her daughter, Sharon (Gillingham) while working to land on his feet.
Things don’t really pick up until well into the second hour as the Red Skull’s men and mercenary daughter, Valentina (Francesca Neri) advance their efforts to hunt the Captain down after kidnapping President Kimball. By then, Rogers is battling the bad guys on the streets before finally suiting back up and venturing to Red Skull’s castle with Sharon to settle the score once and for all.
I vaugely remember watching the theatrical cut of Captain America many, many years ago on television. It was my earliest exposure to any screen iteration of the character next to playing him in the Marvel VS. Capcom arcades, years away from what would follow-up in Marvel Entertainment’s first phase of the MCU with Chris Evans donning the jingoistic colors and shield.
To say the least, The Pyun Cut definitely tries to squeeze a little extra juice out of its melodrama for a more epic affect. It’s not really any better than the film’s original assembly, and definitely lingers with its slow pacing and discontinuity at times, underscoring a film that effectively ends up biting off more than it can chew as a whole. To this, it’s an otherwise admirable attempt to bring justice to a project hampered by its own machinations, and make it the kind of film that potentially should have been with most of the materials that were available.
Don’t feel too bad if you find yourself in a first-time viewing of this film and tapering off in the process. You likely won’t be the first in the film’s 35-year history to do so, depending on your tastes, although you’d be fair to note the film as a measure of the kind of scope that Pyun was tangible to throughout his career. Films like The Sword and The Sorceror, and the early Jean-Claude Van Damme cyberpunk banger, Cyborg, are just a few of the bigger highlights of Pyun’s career, leaving Captain America, or its extended version, plenty of room for fans – between fans – as a hit or miss.
Captain America: The Pyun Cut enjoyed West Coast Premiere as part of the third-edition of the Big Bad Film Fest on the evening of Saturday, August 23.
