From August 2017 – January 2020, Keith R.A. DeCandido took a weekly look at every live-action movie based on a superhero comic that had been made to date in the Superhero Movie Rewatch. He’s periodically revisited the feature to look back at new releases, as well as a few he missed the first time through.
The character of Captain Battle was created by Jack Binder and Carl Formes for Silver Streak Comics in 1941. A veteran of the Great War named Jonathan Battle—who lost an eye in the conflict—he worked to prevent another war from happening. Obviously, he didn’t succeed, and while he was popular enough to get his own comic, Captain Battle Comics wound up only lasting four issues. The short run was possibly due to the United States’ entry into the very war that Captain Battle was struggling to prevent, causing a downturn in interest in a character who was trying to prevent war. The Timely Comics hero Captain America (who punched Hitler in the face on the cover of his first issue) proved to be much more popular and enduring.
In 2011, Captain America starred in his first successful theatrical release, subtitled The First Avenger and featuring Chris Evans in the title role. It was followed up a year later by Avengers, which featured Evans’ Cap quite prominently.
In response to this, a bunch of folks got together and did a Captain Battle movie. The character is, after all, in the public domain. Writers Kenny White and Keith Parker, director David Palmieri, and producer David S. Sterling didn’t have much of a budget to work with (he says, understating the case tremendously), so they set it in modern times rather than the 1940s. However, they did still have him fighting Nazis, with a neo-Nazi group trying to clone Himmler and Hitler. While the Captain Battle of the movie is a legacy, it’s from his father, not a veteran of the twentieth century’s World Wars. He does, however, wear the same costume, complete with eyepatch, though Sam Battle doesn’t have any reason to. He also wears it on his right eye, rather than the left the comic character wore it on (though there are a couple of shots where he has the eyepatch on his left eye).
Initially titled Captain Battle: Legacy War, the movie was reissued under the more generic title of Battle Soldier, possibly because the tie-in to an obscure 1940s comic book character nobody’s ever heard of proved to be a less than efficacious marketing strategy.
As an added bonus, your humble rewatcher co-edited an anthology in 2023 called Double Trouble: An Anthology of Two-Fisted Team-Ups, featuring classic characters pairing up, and Dayton Ward wrote a Captain Battle story that teamed him with another hero who appeared in a backup feature of Captain Battle Comics, Blackout.
Captain Battle: Legacy War
Written by Kenny White & Keith Parker
Directed by David Palmieri
Produced by David S. Sterling
Original release date: January 13, 2013
“We can make things very uncomfortable for you”
We open with a car chase, where a guy in a mullet faces off against some skinheads, but is eventually blown up by an RPG.
A soldier named Sam Battle is on patrol in Iraq with a fellow soldier, when he’s jumped by a couple of insurgents and stabbed in the belly. He’s brought back to HQ, where his friend, Brandon Storm, an Army medic, works on him. At the orders of his colonel, he tries an untested formula on Battle, which saves his life.
The wounds are still bad enough that he’s sent home, and months later, Storm checks on him. He feels healthier than ever now, which makes Storm happy, as it means the formula is doing what it’s supposed to do. At one point, they’re joined by Storm’s sister Jane. Jane is a reporter for a newspaper (Battle makes a jokey comment saying he didn’t realize that newspapers still existed). Jane mentions the rise of neo-Nazis when Battle drives her home after her brother passes out (they’ve been drinking).
We meet some of those neo-Nazis, who are at a strip club and get a lap dance—then pull out a gun and kidnap the stripper and toss her into the back of their Honda Element. Yes, really. And apparently they are in the only strip club in the entire country that doesn’t have metal detectors and/or bouncers.
Storm is also kidnapped by the same neo-Nazis. Battle calls the police, though Jane is concerned that they won’t do much. She also takes Battle to Steve Kelly, another journalist who was an old friend of Battle’s father. Kelly tells a surprised—and disbelieving—Battle that his old man was a vigilante who fought crime (he’s the guy that got blown up in the opening sequence). Battle doesn’t believe it, even though Kelly gives him the red-white-and-blue outfit and eyepatch that his father apparently wore when he was fighting crime. He had retired to raise Battle, though since his son joined the Army, he’d taken up the cause again.
Battle eventually comes around, especially when he returns home to find his place has been ransacked. And then Jane is also kidnapped.
Storm initially refuses to help the neo-Nazis, who are led by a woman named the Necromancer. She’s been kidnapping the strippers in order to get them pregnant—and then abort the fetuses so they can harvest stem cells. They plan to clone Adolph Hitler, but they’re doing a test run first by resurrecting Heinrich Himmler via cloning. They need Storm’s help, which he finally provides once he finds out that they’ve kidnapped Jane.
Battle is ambushed by some skinheads. Kelly has determined several possible locations “in the Midwest” (every single motor vehicle in this movie has California plates) that the neo-Nazis could be using. Battle tries interrogating one of the skinheads (from whom he saves a woman from being raped), but he apparently doesn’t know anything.
The Necromancer succeeds in creating a clone of Himmler, with a combination of Storm’s science and her own magic. For reasons the script doesn’t bother to explain, Himmler’s face is entirely red, though just his face, not his neck or ears. He starts training the troops by making them do push-ups. Sure.
Battle attacks a gang of skinheads, but Himmler shows up (with the red makeup now covering everything) and he knocks Battle out, and they make their escape in the Honda Element. Yes, really. They leave the unconscious Battle behind for reasons the script doesn’t bother to explain, especially since they then go to his house and kidnap him.
They tie him to a chair, enabling the Necromancer to monologue at him for a bit, but then he escapes. He calls the cops and gives them the location. Storm—who suddenly has the full run of the place for no compellingly good reason—finds and frees his sister. Battle is able to stop most of the skinheads, aided by two detectives who show up without any backup and start shooting. The neo-Nazis are mostly captured, but the Necromancer escapes with her plan to clone Hitler still in play.
“I hope he can handle everything I just said”
While my self-imposed mandate to be as complete as humanly possible in this feature meant I kinda had to cover this movie once I discovered it existed, I suspect that I wouldn’t have bothered if I hadn’t already been made aware of the character of Captain Battle through Dayton Ward’s story in Double Trouble. But, having not only learned of the character but come to like him through Dayton’s story and reading the original comics, I was really curious about this movie that did the same thing Jonathan Maberry and I did for Double Trouble: use a character’s public-domain status as a means to tell new stories.
Alas, Captain Battle: Legacy War disappoints on every possible level, except cheese. It’s possible to do a good movie on an exceedingly low budget. This is very much not one of those, as it’s blindingly obvious how little money was spent on everything. The “medical equipment” in the cheap tent set up on a back road in southern California that’s trying to be Iraq looks like stuff pilfered from a grammar school classroom. In one shot, Battle’s eyepatch doesn’t cover his entire eye, and once or twice it’s on the wrong eye. At one point, after Kelly, Battle, and Jane are sitting in a room talking, Kelly invites Battle and Jane to another room—where they sit and talk. There was no reason to go to the other room except maybe the person who owned the house the first bit was shot in needed their house back.
And then there’s the fact that the Necromancer’s pet skinheads drive a Honda Element. Yes, really.
To call the acting in this movie amateurish is a grave insult to amateurs everywhere. To call the plot nonsensical is a huge insult to nonsense. And to call the CGI SFX awful is a hilarious insult to awful things.
No, seriously, the SFX in this movie are laughably bad. I know, because I laughed at all of them. They look like they were done with the 1995 version of MS Paint by someone who never really learned how to use it properly.
All in all, if you want to see a Captain Battle story, read the original comics. Or Double Trouble. Or pretty much anything but this movie…
Next week, we look at the first of two late 2023 releases, The Marvels.
