This mission isn’t just to save hostages, though. Cap’s buddy Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) has to secure a special hard drive loaded with secrets that could change the very balance of power as we know it. You may need an advanced degree from George Lucas Academy to suss out the specifics during all the World Security Council scenes, but when Senator Palpatine – I mean, Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) – says that S.H.I.E.L.D. has been compromised, it isn’t hard to know who the bad guys are.
Steve Rogers is a man out of time, but learns he has to learn to trust a few people. Black Widow proves herself in combat and his jogging buddy Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) shares some of the same PTSD battle scars. They – and some other familiar faces – join forces to root out the evil that’s been festering within the very highest corners of S.H.I.E.L.D., an evil that has a surprising Teutonic bent.
The action in ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’ is some of the best of the Marvel Movie Universe outside of ‘The Avengers‘. The fact that Cap is almost a regular guy is used to great advantage – he winces as he blasts open locked doors with nothing but his own brawn. His signature shield is used often and to great effect in this episode, almost as if it is a part of his body that he can remove, bank off three concrete barriers, thrust inside of a carbine and then yank free in one acrobatic arc.
We finally get to see Samuel L. Jackson‘s Nick Fury engage in some high speed combat, and the titular Winter Soldier – a shadowy figure working for the evil puppet-masters within S.H.I.E.L.D. – makes his debut at center stage in a fashion reminiscent of the Joker in ‘The Dark Knight.’
The central conflict of this film is completely absurd – and may have far-reaching implications for some of the other Marvel properties – but the series continues to luck out with its ace casting choices, zippy dialogue and fast action. Despite all the explosions and ridiculous technology, you still care about Steve Rogers, whose anachronistic seriousness trying dutifully to fit in to our jaded times is as apt a metaphor for remix culture as anything else. This entry won’t win any new converts, but anyone already invested in this series is going to have a blast.
But the custodians of the megabucks Marvel franchise do something remarkable here; radical, even. They get political. Rather than, say, trying to stop a malevolent super-elf destroying the nine realms of Asgard, these superheroes are suddenly grappling with real-world issues such as national security, civil liberty, and intelligence gathering. It's exhilarating to see.
This sequel gets Marvel out of the corner it had painted itself into with its previous cycle of superhero movies, up to Avengers Assemble, which detailed the formation of Shield. Effectively a high-tech, first-world security council with no democratic oversight, Shield was starting to look rather sinister in the post-Edward Snowden landscape. In Star Wars terms, it's the Empire, not the Rebel Alliance. This movie's masterstroke is to flip the equation and bring the whole enterprise into question.
The enemy here is within, which means no one is to be trusted and everything's up in the air, often literally. It would be a crime to spoil the surprises in a plot that owes as much to 1970s conspiracy thrillers as comic books. It's only a pity the workmanlike execution can't match this thematic boldness. This is, after all, a mega-budget studio movie, not an Occupy-funded piece of agit-prop. The genre still demands its product placement, its high-tech weaponry, its crunching action set-pieces, and the obligatory effects-splurge climax in which no one important dies (that's hardly a spoiler considering they're already talking about Captain America 3).
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In terms of star power, Chris Evans is no Robert Downey Jr either, it must be said. He's not even the most famous person called Chris Evans. With his 90s-boyband hairstyle and an emotional range that runs from "a bit sad" to "really quite cross", he tends to disappear into blandness when he's not chucking his shield around.
Burning brighter is Scarlett Johansson, whose Black Widow has fun chipping away at the Captain's old-school earnestness and trying to fix him up with a date. Having played the voluptuous female mascot in this boys' club for so long, Johansson at least gets to be an actual character this time. The supposed baddie of the piece, the Winter Soldier – a sort of metal-armed goth snowboarder – barely registers amid the densely plotted clamour, though he's not the only baddie by any means.
These shortcomings don't really matter, though. The real excitement of the movie is seeing just how far they'll take their political parallels – which is pretty much all the way to a grand conspiracy theory linking current US foreign policy with Nazi totalitarianism. Advocates of the "liberal Hollywood" conspiracy will find plenty of ammunition here, too. In the first movie, an injection transformed wimpy Steve Rogers into strapping Captain America; similarly, this sequel gives the flagging comic-book movie an adrenaline shot of relevance. You've got to hand it to them
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