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Captain America: The Winter Soldier
| Released |
26 March 2014 |
| Director(s) |
Anthony Russo, Joe Russo |
Starring
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Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Sebastian Stan, Anthony Mackie, Cobie Smulders, Frank Grillo, Emily VanCamp, Hayley Atwell, Robert Redford, Samuel L. Jackson |
Writer(s)
|
Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely |
| Producer(s) |
Kevin Feige |
| Origin |
United States |
| Running Time |
135 minutes |
| Genre |
Action, adventure, sci-fi |
| Rating |
12A |
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Go Team America.
It’s a bit odd that a few years ago a common criticism of middle segments of blockbuster trilogies was a criticism that the plot didn’t do anything, merely bridged the gap between the opening instalment and the finale.
But now with the Marvel cinematic universe we are presented with a whole series of movies that don’t really go anywhere, merely bridging the gap until we get to the next big tie-in event flick, and nobody seems to mind. Probably because the movies themselves are just too much fun.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a film that goes nowhere. A formulaic rip-off of a spy thriller in the Bourne mould (with added CGI Helicarriers), the film rips through a nonsensical plot with such committed vigour that it becomes a very hard film not to get sucked into it in terms of pure enjoyment.
About an hour in we find reanimated World War II supersoldier Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and his ex-KGB sidekick Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) locked in an underground bunker from the Cold War trading quips with a dead Nazi scientist who has preserved his mind in a computer. And none of this breaks the suspension of disbelief the movie has built up over the preceding hour. That’s the kind of film it is.
This set-up could (with a protagonist whose literally called Captain America) have been little more than the kind of one-note hurrah-for-America borderline propaganda, but the film seems keen to eschew this expectation as frequently as possible. The villains of the piece utilise a combined allegory of drone warfare and NSA-style omnipresent surveillance, but this isn’t social criticism by any means. It only serves to drive the plot, which effortlessly blends real world politics with a wonderfully colourful sci-fi/fantasy palate.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier is perhaps the best translation of the anything-goes spirit of comic books since Avengers Assemble, and it may even be more ridiculous than that. It doesn’t matter that every five minutes there is a superfluous fist fight or explosion (or, in many cases, both occurring simultaneously), or that the characters are wafer thin caricatures without any real motivation (other than “we gotta save the world, eh, again”) or that the laws of physics are violated more times than the speed limit.
The film is just fun. The kind of slightly nuts, weirdly inspired fun that Stan Lee was patenting in the ‘60s when he created all of these characters. If anything the freedom from having anything really consequential happen is actually an asset. The film feels like an episode of something larger, sure, but one that is enjoyable for exactly that reason.
It’s by the numbers, right down to the post-credit scene that teases what comes next, but the formula still works so why change it. It’s all silly hokum nonsense, but somehow it’s so damn earnest and sure of itself, that no matter how much it spirals into its own self-important ridiculousness it never fails to convince.
- Bernard O'Rourke |
