Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
Doesn't everyone know that there's always an after credits sequence at the end of Marvel Studios movies by now? Everyone left the screening room, the lights turned on bright as they could, the cleaning crew appeared to be waiting for me to leave (I explained to them why I was 'hanging around'). And lo and behold there wasn't only a mid-credits sequence. There was a short sequence after the entire credits had finished too. Admittedly the final after-credits sequence wasn't terribly impressive, but it was cool to see all the same. Even if you're the last one left, it's probably still worth the embarrassment.
To a certain extent this sequel to "Captain America: The First Avenger" is a bit of a retcon of the previous movie. Less of a retcon, it turns out, than I'd been inclined to believe at the time. There were two elements that I felt were particularly inconsistent. Firstly, the claim that the Howling Commandoes had fought many battles with Captain America. Secondly, the revelation that Bucky Barnes could have been retrieved by the scientist Zola (played by Toby Jones) after he fell off the train.
It turns out the first of these is not an inconsistency at all. The so-called "Howling Commandoes" are actually rescued just before the ridiculous montage. So while it doesn't feel like they are in the movie very long and while we do not actually see them doing very much during that time, it isn't a retcon to say that they fought with Captain America in lots of missions. It just feels odd because we never actually see them doing very much in the movie.
However, the claim that Zola retrieves Bucky Barnes body is a complete retcon. Looking back at the original scene Zola is barking orders to a soldier armed with a death ray. Barnes ends up being knocked off the train by a death ray blast and at the end of the sequence, the scientist Zola, who is in the same train, is captured. There is no opportunity for him to send anyone down to retrieve Bucky Barnes body, nor is there any obvious motivation. The idea that the main villain here would be this rather boring character from the first movie is as ludicrous as I thought it would be.
I suspect the problem here is that the evil character available to capture Bucky Barnes would have been the Red Skull himself. But Hugo Weaving is apparently uninterested in returning to the role, leaving the whole job on the shoulders of Toby Jones. On that front, Marvel may well have landed on their feet. There is no one better to sell me on this ridiculous premise than Toby Jones. He's an incredible and versatile actor and in a film that is rather less focussed on jokes than other recent Marvel movies, somehow I am completely going with his performance, over-the-top evil Nazi voice and all...
Another element which concerned me, however, was Captain America's inconsistent powers. I understand that this is something that was present in the comics, but the movies really need to work out where they stand on this. We already saw in the first Captain America movie how Cap is pretty much unaffected by a bullet wound to his side. Here he seems to be able to be thrown back by a rocket launcher blast and to impact into some kind of truck without that much damage. Yet strangely he seems to struggle when fighting one guy in an early scene on a boat, even getting knocked down occasionally. I thought we were going to find out that this foe was a super soldier of some kind too, but there was no such revelation. I suppose the idea is that Steve Rogers is mainly less vulnerable and more durable, as opposed to super-powered like the Asgardians. The force of his attacks seems to be limited, while his ability to handle anything thrown at him seems to be practically unlimited. It's hard for me to work out the balance between his powers of attack and his powers of defence here, but an imbalance towards defence rather than attack power seems to be the only way I can make sense of these seeming inconsistencies.
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If you are not a fan of Greengrass-style shaky-cam, you may have mixed feelings here. While there are no shots of car chases as if the camera is being buffeted around inside the car, there are a lot of moments where the camera shakes during fight scenes to emphasise the visceral attacks. I think it works very well, but then again I thought it worked very well in Greengrass's Bourne sequels too.
There's a very welcome return of Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow. Clearly her own solo movie cannot be far away now. I know that there are many who will be sad not to see Jeremy Renner returning as Hawkeye but, to be frank, Renner has generally been much more interesting in pretty much ANY other role I've seen him play. And Nick Fury finally gets to be a proper badass here in a way we've never really seen before.
Of course, perhaps that's not surprising considering that this is the first movie where I think Captain America has really had an opportunity to be a proper badass too. There's some proper use of the bouncing shield technique that never looked all that effective in the first Cap movie. We also get some pretty effective hand-to-hand moments and the clash of Captain America and his supered-up opponent The Winter Soldier is properly brutal and thrilling. (Children between 8 and 12 coming to this 12A rated movie will, I feel, be well-chuffed with the level of violence they are offered here.) The fight scenes involving Black Widow in "Iron Man 2" had actually been some of the few great hand-to-hand fight scenes in the series so far, but here in "The Winter Soldier" we have similarly high quality up-close-and-personal fight scenes for a great deal of the run time.
I had already seen the Falcon character in the trailer and I must say that I still feel the same way about him in the movie as I felt about him in the trailer. A character with metal wings is one of the most stupid things I have ever seen. I'll admit though, that the actions scenes involving Falcon are impressive enough to make it worth the utter silliness of it.
This is an all-round feature film, with comedic moments, action moments, emotional moments, character moments, with a fairly intelligent plot surrounding the workings of SHIELD working in the background. I wouldn't say that this is distancing Marvel from the silliness of their previous movies, but I would say that it doesn't allow the comedy to dominate quite so much as in their previous efforts.
While not quite as daft as I was expecting when I first entered the cinema, the "Winter Soldier" didn't entirely work for me. His main power seems to be a metal arm and I was convinced that a plan would be formed to remove it. Captain America seems characteristically naive in his dealings with the Winter Soldier's memory loss, but I found the resolution of that villain's story rather unsatisfying. In the end, I don't think this is really a film about the Winter Soldier at all. That character certainly plays an important role here, but he's not the main focus of the story.
Also, I'm quite pleased that Jenny Agutter gets something more important to do than sit around and complain about how SHIELD is being managed. No more details - you'll have to see for yourself! :D
A-