Captain America: The Winter Soldier (***½)

Directed by: Anthony & Joe Russo

Starring: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Cobie Smulders, Frank Grillo, Emily VanCamp, Hayley Atwell, Robert Redford, Samuel L. Jackson, Toby Jones, Gary Shandling, Georges St-Pierre

Seen: March 28^th 2014

***½ Out of ****

Marvel is playing a big game, and with Captain America: The Winter Soldier they continue hitting that same great stride. Directors Anthony & Joe Russo have made a movie that simultaneously fits perfectly into the Marvel universe and one that takes its own direction. This is thanks to a completely different outlook on the action in this movie – where other Marvel movies are comic book movies and thus employ (very entertaining) comic book action and large scale destruction (which this movie does not lack), Captain America: The Winter Soldier feels more like a classic 90’s action blockbuster. I had thoughts of the street shootout from Heat and fist-fights from Broken Arrow to name but two from many more along those lines while watching this movie, and I absolutely loved it.

Steve Rogers (Evans), Captain America, is still working for SHIELD two years after the events of The Avengers in New York, still not completely integrated into the current century. Early in the movie he meets the war veteran and counsellor Sam Wilson (Mackie) while jogging, just before he is called to help secure a SHIELD ship from a terrorist takeover led by Georges Batroc (St-Pierre). With him on the mission is a SHIELD team and agent Natasha Romanoff (Johansson), but he catches her running a secondary mission which awakens some suspicions regarding SHIELD’s management. He confronts Nick Fury (Jackson), who tells him of SHIELD’s latest project, Insight, the building of three massive heli-carriers linked to spy satellites that will give SHIELD the capability to eliminate any threat to them, on large scale, anywhere on earth. Rogers is quick to comment that he feels this is a removal of freedom, not the advancement of it, but the thought doesn’t gain traction before a serious attack on SHIELD escalates matters to Fury’s boss, Alexander Pierce (Redford). This sets events sprawling towards a fantastic showdown between Captain America and The Winter Soldier, between SHIELD and Hydra.

The combat in this movie is fantastic, with two fight scenes standing head-and-shoulders above anything I’ve seen in a while: both featuring the Captain fighting firstly Batroc, and then later The Winter Soldier himself. And it doesn’t stop there either, the large scale action is just as impressive and visually appealing. The plot smartly weaves together the massive action set-pieces, with Hydra, the villainous group from the first movie, making a sensational reappearance.

While I’ve already mentioned how the movie captures something of the 90’s action blockbuster era, Captain America: The Winter Soldier also harks back to earlier spy movies with World War II and Cold War thinking, and this made the movie somewhat smarter – in my opinion – than The Avengers (also a fantastic movie). Chris Evans’ Captain America is probably as close as Marvel will get to a Superman character, and Marvel has trumped Superman with this iteration of Captain America; he is an absolutely upstanding citizen and an inspirational character. Not a single cast member missteps throughout the movie, bringing us a comic book movie that is Marvel’s best yet at producing such a gritty and capturing “real” world, the closest Marvel has come to the realism of Christopher Nolan’s very real Batman movies.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is my favourite Marvel movie to date, closely beating out The Avengers, with the first two X-Men movies also deserving mention. Whether you liked the first Captain America movie in 2011 or not, you will like this one. It improves upon the first movie in every conceivable way, and it makes me very excited to see the progress Marvel is making in telling some of the floods of stories they have available.