In director Joe Johnston’s “Captain America: The First Avenger,” Chris Evans plays the titular superhero.

At what point did filmmakers decide that Nazis without supernatural powers were not evil enough? The first Indiana Jones film, an early exemplar of this presumption, featured Steven Spielberg’s Nazis on a manic quest to capture the Ark of the Covenant. Similarly, “Captain America: The First Avenger” enhances its insufficiently nefarious Nazis by granting them some nondescript power “of the gods” with which to commit their sinister acts. This sort of basic thematic coding—Nazis, bad; Nazis plus supernatural force, very bad—runs rampant in the formulaic “Captain America,” a film that substitutes clichés and poor gestures at genuine plotting for real filmmaking.

It is no doubt difficult to make a truly interesting film out of a dated propaganda premise, but the shortcomings of “Captain America” would not be so galling if the film didn’t, in its finer moments, provide sublime glimpses of something greater. At its best, “Captain America” captures a pristine sense of nostalgia, offering elegant shots of a bygone New York and peppering them with snappy dialogue reminiscent of older movies. The grace of these occasional moments is buoyed by the occasional humorous aside that lets the audience know that the film isn’t taking itself too seriously. When Captain America (Chris Evans) tests out his newfound powers in pursuit of a foreign spy, he finds himself in the sort of moral quandary that would have sunk Batman or Spiderman: the villain has taken a little boy and thrown him off a pier into the water. When Captain America sprints to the side of the pier to leap to the boy’s rescue, the child gleefully calls up “Don’t worry—I can swim!” This sort of lightheartedness suits the first avenger’s story best.

The film, however, forsakes its whimsical levity with unannounced sea changes in tone. Pleasant characters who have only just been introduced soon die tragic deaths that beg for collective mourning; a ragged crew of recently emancipated POWs raises up a painfully earnest cry of “Let’s hear it for Captain America!” These nearly schizophrenic shifts in register are destabilizing, pulling the light net of irony and fun from beneath the audience’s feet and submerging them in absurd, clumsy melodrama. This failing is most apparent in the brewing romance between Captain America and Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), which turns from playful banter to soul-crushing love in order to provide an emotional undercurrent to the seemingly avoidable sacrifice that concludes the film.

The film’s unbalanced tone is mirrored in its aesthetic confusion. On the one hand, it features drab, soft-focus shots of old-fashioned set pieces. Filled with bomber jackets, classic army helmets, and art deco furnishings, these nostalgic scenes unabashedly revel in the past. Yet Johnston throws the odd futuristic element into the mix, dressing the enemy forces like the stormtroopers of “Star Wars” and implanting a variety of implausibly futuristic sinister technologies.

Were the filmmakers more decisive about what type of film they were making, “Captain America” would undoubtedly have been more successful. All the ingredients were present for campy throwback, full-throated action, or melodramatic nostalgia, yet none of these possibilities is carried through.

Instead, the film’s jarring shifts are aggravated by its singularly bizarre pacing. There is roughly an hour of plodding set-up in which—save for a few humorous moments—there is no character development. Pre-serum, the most defining trait of Steve Rogers, the future Captain America, is that he is small but has a big heart—a mantra that is hammered into the viewer’s skull repeatedly by nearly every character encountered. The title of the film might as well have been “Captain America: The Small Avenger Who Has a Big Heart and, Eventually, Equally Large Muscles.” After this unnecessarily long prelude, the film launches several action sequences, the most important of which happen in long-form montage. Had the filmmakers given Captain America more screen time with which to bash people with his shield, the film might have been more immediate and fulfilling. Alas, the film’s action happens in awkward, disconnected bursts and its emotion is left languishing in poorly developed scenes.

The artistic attraction of producing a Captain America film in the current socio-political climate lies in the incongruity between his America and our own—that is, the contrast between the economically stagnant, politically deadlocked United States of today and the decisive country of yesteryear where cheering on a flamboyantly dressed superhero named “Captain America” would not seem so ridiculous due to the existence of clearly defined external enemies. As if to underscore this irony, “Captain America” came prancing onto screens across the country at a time when the nation was mired in an unnecessarily traumatic fiscal crisis. Watching the film, one gets the feeling that if Captain America were in on the budget talks, Speaker John Boehner would have been felled by a flying shield early on in his obstinacy, at which point Captain America would have turned his attention to the real problem: Nazis with supernatural powers. Yet despite the abundant potential for social commentary or simple self-conscious satire, this plodding film makes no bold statements, provides little fodder for even old-fashioned escapism, and amounts to little more than a strangely compelling, unfulfilled promise.

—Staff writer Benjamin Naddaff-Hafrey can be reached at bhafrey@college.harvard.edu.