It’s kind of hard to explain to people why, but I just fucking love Captain America. He’s always been this moral constant in the Marvel Universe. He always knows what’s right and he always does what’s right. I think Marvel Studios did a great job in both Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers in capturing both the tone of the character and how to best represent his powers. I read the original Winter Soldier storyline when it first came out, and seeing that it would form the basis of Captain America’s sequel, I was pretty excited. Even though the trailers didn’t get me all that excited, I’d heard nothing but positive things about Captain America: Winter Soldier, and some people were even saying it was the best movie that Marvel’s put out. Even though it could possibly be the best movie Marvel has made, it wasn’t a movie I was a huge fan of.
“Yup, we’re also wondering why you can’t seem to have a consistent hairstyle.”
Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is doing his best with adjusting to the time period he woke up in. He spends most of his time following orders from Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) as it seems he still has a soldier’s mentality. When Fury informs Rogers about a new program that will eliminate targets before the targets have even committed any crimes, Rogers starts questioning if his involvement is really what’s right or if he’s just following orders. Fury is targeted by an assassin that has a legendary reputation, who we’ll refer to as a “Winter Soldier”, and Captain America has to not only figure out who this assassin is but also why Fury was targeted. Then…well, I don’t know, there’s a lot of Army talk and Captain America is treated like he’s a bad guy suspect but hey, guess what, Captain America is a good guy so I think things will work out okay for him.
I know when I was a kid I always wanted my superpowers to be a cool backpack wearing dude.
The first 15 minutes of this movie got me so, so excited. We saw Captain America on a mission beating the shit out of bad guys and tossing his goddamn shield around like a maniac. YES! There was a scene where he keeps running super fast past the eventual Falcon (Anthony Mackie) and then Falcon tells him to get a Marvin Gaye album and we see inside Cap’s notebook and there are all these things that he’s written down that he’s missed. HAHAHA, CLASSIC STEVE ROGERS! Once the spy stuff got going, that’s when it lost me. Don’t get me wrong, Captain America: The Winter Soldier made for a super entertaining action-espionage thriller, but I don’t really like those movies. It felt like someone dropped Captain America into a Mission: Impossible movie. THERE WAS EVEN A SCENE WITH MASK TRICKERY! I won’t give that away, but I couldn’t help but scoff. I guess when it comes to my Cap, I like seeing him pointed at a bad thing and taking it out. Remember that scene in The First Avenger where he’s beating the shit out of Nazis with the Howling Commandos? I could have watched that as a movie. After all, with a name as cheesy as “Captain America”, sometimes it’s okay to embrace the one-dimensional nature of that character instead of having to use the current security state of America to try to make any sort of points.
Wait, the Winter Soldier can punch shields?! I thought that shield was UN-PUNCHABLE!
There were a few times when I had to remind myself that this movie had “Winter Soldier” in its title because most of the time I was thinking, “Where the fuck is the Winter Soldier?” I haven’t read the Winter Soldier storyline since it first came out, so I could be wrong, but I thought that at least a majority of that story was about who this guy was and why he was doing it? The focus of the movie was more about Steve Rogers trying to get to the bottom of whether or not Robert Redford was a good guy or a bad guy. It felt like the Winter Soldier character was just kind of tossed in there so that Cap would have somebody more than just a hired thug to beat the shit out of but could also be handled by just Cap and not need the rest of the Avengers. Coming in at over two hours, I felt like either the Winter Soldier storyline could have been cut completely or cut out of the spy tomfoolery so Winter Soldier ended up with more weight in the film.
It’s okay, I’ll overlook your goofy hair for your cool butt any day, ScarJo.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a good movie. Chris Evans IS Captain America, Samuel L. Jackson got more stuff to do, and Scarlett Johansson‘s poor acting skills once again worked well as a spy who is seemingly always “playing it cool”. New additions of Frank Grillo and Emily VanCamp helped plant the seed of where future stories could go, but, then again, HOW MANY FUCKING CHARACTERS DO WE HAVE TO KEEP TRACK OF?! This Marvel Universe is getting pretty confusing. I’d even say I got more distracted towards the end of the movie wondering where the next film(s) will go. I thought it was cool to see Cap wearing something similar to what he wore in the Secret Avengers series from a few years ago, and it almost makes me think the next film could be a version of the Secret Wars storyline. Also knowing characters involved with Avengers: Age of Ultron make me think that the next Cap movie could be something like Avengers: Disassembled and, dare I say, Avengers 3 might be Civil War? Oh boy, I’m getting a nerd boner. This movie is far from being Iron Man 2, as it didn’t feel like it was just more of what we had seen in the first film. They took one aspect of Captain America and explored it, it just wasn’t a story I really needed to see. In that respect, it felt much more like how I felt about Thor: The Dark World where, even though I had no complaints, I couldn’t completely buy into what the movie was giving me. Marvel did another great job and I know this movie will make a bazillion dollars and tons of people will love it, but I’d rather just watched Captain America punch more Nazis.
Wolfman Moon Scale
The Wolfman Cometh 