Captain America: The Winter Soldier

 

When it comes to superhero movie sequels, most tend to play it safe, pumping out a sequel that offers more action and bigger set pieces at the expense of story. This is essentially the case of Iron Man 2 and Thor 2, two fun movies that you mostly just remember for the scenes involving explosions, robot fights and inter-dimensional hammer throwing. Captain America 2 doesn’t play it safe. Hell it ignores the general rulebook and does something completely different, dispensing almost entirely with the superhero trapping and offering a somewhat different sort of superhero movie. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is, interestingly enough, a spy thriller. Granted a high-action high-pulp one, but it has many of the trappings.

After the whole ‘Avengers’ thing, Steve Rogers, also known as Captain America, essentially works for SHIELD, the global (but centred in America, because of course it is) defensive attack force headed by Nick Fury responsible for monitoring superheroes and taking out threats. While he excels at his missions, Steve is becoming increasingly agitated by all the secrets and lies that seem to come with SHIELD membership, particularly when he finds that a hostage rescue he was leading was mostly cover so that Fury’s other top agent, Natasha Romanov, could covertly filch some secret files. Tensions run high amongst the three, with Steve questioning his trust of both Fury and Romanov (Scarlett Johansson’s character, who gets a bigger role here), while Fury himself is concerned about SHIELD’s big new defence project, headed by SHIELD branch commander Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford getting in on the superhero boom).

An assassination attempt on Nick Fury points to deep-seated corruption within SHIELD, and has Steve and Natasha on the run as fugitives with their own organisation hunting them down. At the front of this hunt in the titular Winter Soldier, a grenade-launcher wielding assassin with a robotic arm whose abilities rival Steve’s and whose identity comes as a shock to the hero. Compared to post-Avengers sequels such as Thor 2 or Iron Man 3, this one looks to have a far more drastic effect on the Marvel cinematic universe, with an ending that looks to shake things up in the future.   

The action sequences are quite taut and intense, feeling like scenes out from Mission Impossible or the Bourne series, but mixing in a little superhero flair (a magic shield that ricochets bullets, robot arms and winged jetpacks get mixed in). That said, this is the first time I can remember where a superhero movie has had action sequences that feel so high-stakes. You know that Iron Man and Thor will shake off whatever gets thrown at them, but here the scenes do carry that feeling of genuine danger, with hailing bullets, ramming cars and explosions all feeling deadly. Compared to the pulpy action of the first Captain America, which mostly lacked in large-scale action set pieces, Winter Soldier offers up some pretty exciting moments, including the tense assassination attempt on Nick Fury (which finally lets us see Samuel L Jackson get in on some of the action).

Most superhero sequels try to do the ‘mid-life superhero crisis’ arc, where a hero questions their actions and abilities. Some do this well (Sam Riami’s Spiderman 2 might as well be the best example of this), while others struggle to pull it off. Captain America 2 does this somewhat differently, with Rogers not questioning his abilities but their use, whether the cause he’s been fighting for is the right one anymore. It also takes an exceptionally brief look at Rogers as a man who has lost his world and everybody he knew and love, giving a brief glimpse into the emotional turmoil that’s hidden underneath the stars and stripes, but only a glimpse.  If there was one failing it would be that the movie doesn’t delve deep enough into this; Rogers is also assumed to have already re-integrated into society so there are no fish-out-of-water moments, which would have been nice.

As with all these Marvel movies, there are end credits scenes. One is played after the early credits, offering some cryptic views into villainous characters that are sure to come up around the time of Avengers 2 (which mostly cause me to shrug and say ‘who the hell are these people?’). Another is a twenty second clip right at the end of the credits that is also shrug-worthy, not particularly offering much.

All in all Winter Soldier is an entertaining sequel, daring to go darker and mix things up with the Marvel universe and characters. As somebody who liked the first Captain America movie, but felt it was a little outclasses by its peers in the action department, it’s great to see Winter Soldier pull off some impressing set pieces. I’d compare it favourable against the other two post-Avengers sequels, Iron Man 3 (entertaining but odd) and Thor 2 (easily the safest sequel of the bunch).