Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America is living it up in present day Washington DC, having woken from his cryogenic slumber at the close of The First Avenger. Rogers doesn’t appear to be having too much trouble adjusting to life in the modern world either: he exercises, thwarts international terrorism and engages in quippy office banter. Yes, thanks to Rogers and SHIELD all is right in the world.
However, as is often the case with comic books, nothing is quite as it seems. For starters, there’s an embedded group of crypto-Nazis deep inside SHIELD and they mean to do harm to everything Rogers knows and loves. There’s also a mysterious assassin hell bent on taking out the Captain, and not even his Mighty Shield can force the mystery soldier to yield! Oh, and if that wasn’t bad enough, one of the secret Nazis is Garry Shandling!
Winter Soldier’s biggest issue is that it takes a long time to move past the exercising and gossiping and get to the crypto-Nazi plotting. The other big issue with the film’s pacing is the titular Winter Soldier: he’s absent for a long portion of the film, and when he does show up you never get a real sense of him as a nemesis or worthwhile villain. It’s the inverse of the first film, which had a great but underutilised villain in the Red Skull; with Winter Soldier you see the big bad quite a bit, but he’s not as interesting as he could be.
The movie hits another snag when it comes to its more dramatic moments, often involving the offing of near and dear cast members. In the world of comic books nothing is for definite, least of all death, so when major, series-defining characters die off you can be certain that they’ll be back in the months to come. In the case of comic book movies, the wait for a character’s resurrection is a matter of minutes rather than one of months, and as such the dramatic twists and tragedies in this film are made moot. It’s unfortunate that much of the film’s dramatic tension falls flat on account of our increasing familiarity with the generic features of the comic medium: there are few surprises in the two hour running time, least of all in the film’s closing act.
Winter Soldier’s final hour or so is exactly what you would expect: a race against time, a crazy chase, explosions, crash zooms, pans, more explosions and so on. The final act is sometimes exciting in its scale and CG FX, and there’s definitely enough whizzbang to go around, but there’s a feeling of dejà vu about this two-fisted finale. You’ve seen it all before in the past three or four Marvel movies, and you’re going to see it again soon and for years to come.
Words: Luke Maxwell
