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Captain America: The Winter Soldier

I’m in a distinct minority in believing that Captain America: The First Avenger was the best of Marvel’s “phase one” superhero movies. Sure, the various Iron Man films rock but that’s entirely due to the marvelous performance of Robert Downey Jr. In contrast to Tony Stark’s flamboyance as Iron Man, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is just a regular man who is turned into a super soldier. After singlehandedly winning World War 2 (at least in Europe, or at least against HYDRA, people so evil that even the Nazis rejected them), Rogers found himself frozen. He slept, and woke up in time to facilitate the defeat of Loki in The Avengers.

And now he’s back again, in his second solo film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

For the most part, the film is great. Everyone hits their marks, no one has a lousy performance, the dialogue is good to great, etc. The plot is even intriguing, the writers and directors opting to turn this into a “political thriller” in the vein of Three Days of the Condor.

Chris Evans continues to do Captain America justice. One of the great things I enjoyed about the first film was that he played a good man playing the good guy. It would have been so easy for the role, and performance, to drop into camp and Evans just won't let that happen. Instead, his performance is free of cynicism and I love it for that.

Scarlett Johansson owns the role of Natasha Romanoff in the same way that Downey Jr. owns Tony Stark. Maybe even more so. She was one of the absolute best things in The Avengers, and she continues that here. She and Chris Evans have an awesome chemistry and their scenes together are great.

Everyone else does what needs to be done. I’m not knocking that, but no one else simply stands out like Evans and Johansson, and that includes Robert Redford. Coincidentally, Redford played the titular Condor in Three Days of the Condor, and here he is again in a political thriller. Only maybe not so innocent this time. C’mon, that’s not a spoiler. Just watch a trailer or two and you know that Redford’s Alexander Pierce is up to no good.

The action sequences are mostly great. At least they are when the camera can stop swooshing from side to side and let me actually see what the hell is going on. It’s not the dreaded shaky cam, but here we get the swooshy cam and it’s just as annoying. Fortunately, there was someone who had the wisdom, from time to time, to pull back and let us see what was going on, and what’s going on are some brilliantly executed action sequences.

Not everything is peachy. One of my biggest issues is with the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) himself. He’s described as a world-class assassin, but from what they show, he sucks at his job. To give you specific examples would enter into spoiler territory, but suffice to say that for the most part he can’t hit the broad side of a barn. With a Gatling gun.

Other characters exist only to introduce more comic book heroes, such as Falcon. Anthony Mackie does a perfectly great job with the role, but it’s pretty pointless. In fact, the Winter Soldier is pretty pointless. Neither is key to the plot, at least not of this film.

Complaining about these things is as pointless as having these characters in the film. It’s not quite fan service because the Marvel universe is pretty damn big. There are hints, subtle and broad, of other aspects of that universe. For crying out loud, they name drop Doctor Strange, and I, for one, will line up to see a that film.

But sometimes it feels like these people are in the film for the sole purpose of expanding that Marvel comic universe onto the big screen. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it feels like padding (at best) or a distraction (at worst).

Nonetheless, The Winter Soldier corrects my complaint with Thor: The Dark World in that the death and destruction seems more in hand rather than wild and indiscriminate. It’s visceral and has consequences. As a result, the threat here is far more intimate rather than an existential threat against mankind and perhaps all life in the universe. The film, therefore, becomes much more engaging and main threat more...threatening.

And even as a political statement, a comic book style warning about omnipresent surveillance and drone warfare, it almost works.

Almost. To explain my bigger, and purely personal, issues with the film would require spoilers and I just don’t want to go there. Let me just say that it’s a very enjoyable romp, that Captain America is still my favorite member of the Avengers, and I really, really want to see the Black Widow in her own film. Preferably with Doctor Strange.

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