Captain America, The Winter Soldier review: All American Average

The multi-billion dollar cinematic universe Marvel Comics had been fashioning since the nineties has seen its fair share of hits and misses. From the brilliance of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers and the superb original Iron Man to the ill-fated Daredevil and Electra, the legendary company has witnessed dozens of its characters rise into superhero Valhalla or tumble into irrelevance. Captain America lies somewhere between the two, which is perhaps still more disappointing than the character being a complete failure on the big screen. While mildly entertaining, what the brothers Russo have created in this sequel is a distinctly uninspired and almost lazy attempt to reignite the career of a character who, in any case, was hardly one of the Marvel elite.

Assuming that everyone has already seen The First Avenger, the film bounds straight back into the chaos-ridden life of Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). Still having trouble readjusting to modern life having been frozen in ice for sixty years, he’s living in Washington DC and working for the ever-shady espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D.   But when S.H.I.E.L.D is compromised, the all America super-soldier unites with Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow to expose a deadly conspiracy. The plot is handled in classic Marvel style, blazing through the actual story to leave more screen time to throw the special effects budget at in a series of the usual ludicrously explosive battles. The regular use of these sequences allows for a breakneck, sugar-rush pace which prevents you from asking “just what on earth is going on”, until the film has finished and you’ve got time to think about it. Of course, when really considered the whole picture becomes largely nonsensical, so it’s certainly an impressive achievement of pacing that this rarely becomes apparent during the movie. It’s hardly an authentic filmmaking technique, but it does at least make the scenarios plausible. After all, who’s going to buy into a Marvel film with a plot that actually makes sense?

So far, so average Marvel, but what really prevents The Winter Soldier from being one of the studio’s finer efforts is its character development: there simply isn’t any. Zero effort, cringeworthy or not, is made to flesh out any of the lead characters, creating a substantial disconnection between film and audience. When that’s coupled with a remarkably average script and cast performances which rarely rise above adequate, you’re left with a popcorn-munching indifference towards the fate of the film’s heroes and villains, rendering all efforts at tension and cliffhangers redundant. Speaking of villains raises another huge issue: the movie lacks any particularly compelling or charismatic antagonists. The Winter Soldier advertised so proudly by the tagline is given a shockingly tiny screen time and next to no lines, but that’s not even the principle problem with the figure. Aside from a momentary connection with The First Avenger, the character is brutally undeveloped, to the point that he appears more of a hired gun than the true focus of the movie.  It’s particularly disappointing for Marvel, who’ve always featured the most flamboyant and exciting villains in comics, to create such a dull and misplaced one here.

In fact, apart from being for the most part inferior, the only thing that distances The Winter Soldier from its counterparts is in its vain effort to produce a topical and intelligent subplot. Its themes of governmental spying and lack of privacy could not be more relevant with the US government’s embarrassment at the hands of Edward Snowden still at the forefront of international concerns, but this effort at politically infusing the film with a message about how much control governments should have over the lives of citizens is never fully explored, and it’s constantly reversed by the rest of the movie’s thorough lack of intelligence.

For a studio which has produced some truly standout efforts on their quest in create a big screen world as rich and interdependent as the comics, The Winter Soldier is an impressively average movie. With meagre lead performances, an exceptionally dismal storyline and fewer than average links to the other Marvel movies, this unremarkable picture is destined to reside in supermarket offers sections rather than the annals of superhero-lore.

4/10