The Marvel casting gurus pull off a hat trick with their latest feature, Captain America: The First Avenger, in which Chris Evans dons the star-spangled duds of one of the comic company's earliest heroes, who made his first appearance in 1941. The 30-year-old actor has proven himself a charismatic presence in the past, making a strong impression in otherwise uneven films like Cellular, The Losers and both Fantastic Four movies, in which he played Marvel's resident firebrand Johnny Storm a.k.a. The Human Torch. Going into Captain America, the big question was whether he'd have the gravitas required to be the kind of square-jawed lone hero (as opposed to the wisecracking team player) that this character represents. Fortunately, Evans more than rises to the occasion; in addition to bulking up his body, he ably flexes his dramatic muscles, playing Cap and his alter ego Steve Rogers -- a skinny kid from Brooklyn who enlists in a top-secret medical project in the early days of World War II that transforms him into a super-soldier -- with an appealing earnestness that never turns campy. Unlike a number of contemporary screen heroes (hello Green Lantern and Spider-Man), Evans' Captain America doesn't waste time brooding over whether he should be fighting the good fight; he just grabs his cowl, uniform and shield and charges onto the front lines.

If Marvel Studios has so far excelled at finding strong heroes, they haven't yet recruited a great villain to test them against. Even the great Jeff Bridges couldn't turn Iron Man's Obadiah Stane into a truly formidable opponent and Iron Man 2's tag-team of Whiplash (Mickey Rourke) and Justin Hammer (Sam Rockwell) left a lot to be desired. Meanwhile, Thor handily dispatched his irritating step-brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) once he became wise to his tricks. None of these confrontations have crackled with the tension that comes with watching a pair of well-matched, richly characterized opponents throw down -- think Batman and the Joker from The Dark Knight, Spider-Man and Doc Ock from Spider-Man 2 and, best of all, Superman and General Zod from Superman II. The First Avenger sends Captain America up against his chief nemesis from the comics, Johann Schmidt better known as the Red Skull, so named because... well, because he's got a red skull sitting atop his body. Schmidt is played by the great Hugo Weaving, who's got one of the best evil grins in the business and knows how to turn the most innocuous sentence into a "come and get me" taunt. But the Red Skull remains a largely uninteresting villain; an associate of Hitler, he's turned the secret Nazi research division HYDRA into his own private army, with which he intends to conquer the world, including Germany. With the rest of the Allied forces otherwise occupied, it's up to the Sentinel of Liberty and his crack squad of soldiers, the Howling Commandos, to stop him.

Like that Team America song goes, Captain America's most enjoyable moments are its many montages. Before he's sent to the front, for example, Cap's first assignment is to be a propaganda tool, shilling for bonds, headlining USO shows and appearing in black-and-white serials to be played in movie houses across the country. This part of his career is summarized in an energetic, terrifically edited highlights reel that's set to the tune of a note-perfect recreation of one of those vintage WWII patriotic numbers. Later on, when he's become a full-fledged soldier, his first rock 'em, sock 'em exploits are condensed into an action-packed sequence that gets the audience's blood pumping. In general, The First Avenger boasts some of this summer's strongest set-pieces; director Joe Johnston is an old-hand at these kinds of spectacles (his past credits include Jurassic Park III, Jumanji and, my personal favorite, The Rocketeer) and choreographs action sequences that mostly emphasize old-fashioned human fisticuffs over the digital noise that can reduce a movie like Transformers: Dark of the Moon to a muddle. Other highlights here include a rousing chase through the streets of Brooklyn and a daring assault on a moving train as it winds its way through a towering mountain range.

On a scene-to-scene basis though, Captain America is lumpy and formless. It's packed with incident, but it lacks a strong narrative throughline that would give it some much-needed focus and drive. A stronger villain would have helped with that, as would better-written relationships between the star and his various comrades-in-arms. The movie is filled with talented performers who are given little chance to make much of an impression; Sebastian Stan, Derek Luke and Neal McDonough barely register as members of the Howling Commandos and Tommy Lee Jones seems so bored with the material he's been given, he lazily recycles his by-now too familiar Fugitive shtick as Cap's gruff C.O. Meanwhile, the film's lone female character, military liaison Petty Carter (Haley Atwell), amounts to little more than the usual fanboy wet dream of a take-charge, no-nonsense woman whose stern commands to our hero just barely mask the smoldering, stacked, sex-starved babe that lurks underneath.

More crucially, the film is missing a key ingredient that distinguished The Rocketeer and Iron Man: a sense of wonder at witnessing the birth of a hero. There's never a scene where Rogers gets the chance to really enjoy his newfound abilities, in the same way that Cliff Secord revels in taking to the skies with a jetpack strapped to his back or Tony Stark screams with delight during his maiden flight as Iron Man. In that way, Captain America is sadly reflective of the current trend in comic book movies, where the hero's abilities are primarily presented as a burden rather than the ultimate opportunity for self-improvement. In Evans, as with Downey and Hemsworth before him, Marvel found a Captain America that audiences will want to root for. Now they just need to put him at the center of a better movie. Perhaps The Avengers?