Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Just when you think you know what is going to happen next in the Marvel cinematic universe, they throw you a curve ball. Or in the case of Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a curve shield. The film has Captain America, played by Chris Evans, adapting to life in the 21st century. But beyond learning about iPhones and the Berlin Wall, he has the ever conniving and secretive SHIELD to try and decode. Plus there’s the deadly appearance of the Winter Soldier to deal with. This movie has a whole lot of stuff going on. It could even have been labeled as a SHIELD movie because this is the first time we’ve seen the organization featured so much in the forefront of the story telling.

As the no-nonsense member of The Avengers, Evans approaches the character head on focusing on maintaining a steady personality. If anything, Cap should be more frazzled by everything going on around him. The plot is quite complex as Marvel breaks down the barriers they built themselves in the previous films. The second Captain America is so important to Marvel’s overall structure that it really weakens the previous phase two films. We’re looking at you Iron Man 3 and Thor: The Dark World.

But what is tough about being a piece of such a large series is that it causes holes in the stand alone films. We get a lot of underdeveloped characters that may return in the future, maybe not. Emily Van Camp’s Agent 13 comes to mind. Also we lose time with the title character in order to build what is essentially a team of secret Avengers for this film. Cap is joined by Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson), Falcon (Anthony Mackie), Agent Hill (Cobie Smulders) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to bring down the bad guys. That’s all fun and exciting. But we watched Tony Stark drag his suit around in the snow for a while in his last movie. Where’s that insight into the character for Captain America?

The Film moves quickly never letting you catch your breath as you’re treated to tie-ins to the previous Captain America film, Avenger’s allusions and easter egg name dropping to appease the hardcore fans. (Did you catch the mention of Dr. Strange, a character we’ll likely see sooner or later?) There’s no question Marvel is continuing to strive for fresh approaches to the comic book genre. This film was advertised as essentially more of the same with Cap fighting bad guys with SHIELD. To avoid spoilers, let’s just say this isn’t that. Touché Disney and Marvel. Touché.

Each film earns either zero, a half or a full arrow in five categories. The categories are Acting, Writing/Directing, Emotion, Innovation and Overall Impression. The arrows are added up to equal the full score.