Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Directed by: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo
Continuing the story of the 95lb weakling who wished he was a 240lb hero, The Winter Soldier gives the good captain (Chris Evans) another semi-solo outing from his Avengers home.
During a routine rescue of a hijacked ship and crew (don’t expect Captain Phillips – this sequence plays more like a slick version of Super Mario, with tracking shots of Captain America ploughing through villains who bounce off his ever-ready shield) our hero starts to suspect that his colleagues in S.H.I.E.L.D. aren’t telling him everything.
This uneasiness grows as Cap’n Rogers argues against the deployment of a trio of death-dealing flying fortresses linked to a series of satellites that can read people’s DNA and correlate this with predictive information based on people’s social media activity and browsing history. I. Kid. You. Not.
But before things can get too cerebral in a “1940s Greatest Generation values vs Camp x-Ray morals” sort of way, all hell breaks loose as S.H.I.E.L.D. Director Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) is the target of a murderous attack, leaving the Captain as that movie trope, the-man-on-the-run-from-his-own-organisation. Accompanied by Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and new buddy Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Rogers has to confront his almost-equal, the masked Winter Soldier, and his string-pulling master, a sort of earth-bound Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine.
It’s a problem that all of the Avengers movies have to face at some point in their running time – how to give their highly individualistic heroes a chance to shine when they are part of such a fearsomely weaponed organisation as S.H.I.E.L.D. The answer is inevitably that S.H.I.E.L.D. has to be rendered inoperative (or even hostile), leaving our champ to save the day.
And this he does with some style, biffing his way through a mass of enemies (and real estate) though as usual it relies on the woeful targeting skills of any armed opponent – can’t these guys hit anything?
SPOILER ALERT (though shame on you if you hadn’t figured this out early in the film)… More of a problem is the utterly non-threatening nature of the evil mastermind behind the Winter Soldier, head of the World Security Council, Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford). It’s been said that Redford is too fond of playing the liberal hero and on the strength of this performance he hasn’t quite made the breakthrough to credible baddie (contrast his performance with Henry Fonda’s Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West).
Overall, the movie maintains enough momentum in the second half to let you overlook the plot absurdities and clichés, and leaves enough unresolved to make you look forward to the inevitable rematch.
