The Slick Marvel Machine Goes On

Rating: 8/10 (3 June 2016)

Now I'm going to begin with what the whole films premise pretty much depends upon...do we believe in the animosity between Rogers & Stark & the answer is pretty much a blurred 'kind of', yes we've seen snippets of their characters butting heads, heard their snarky remarks towards each other in previous films, but what has to be believable is that that can escalate to pretty much them having to take each other out in support of their principles/ideals & as I said it kind of achieves it, now I know the first act has to attempt to build up that animosity between the principles but it feels a little slow on pacing yet somehow feels like that character relationship dynamic is quickly accelerated (yes I know that sounds pretty contradictory).
Now I'm going to skip straight to the airport scene in the middle act....oh my word it was just brilliant & one of the best action/fighting segments I've seen in a Marvel film, I'm actually juggling with the concept of whether...now to say it saves a big part of the film would be disrespectful of other things the film is doing really well but there's no doubt in my mind it gave the film one hell of an shot in the arm (pun intended) that was kind of needed, on another note does that Cold War conspiracy feel of The Winter Soldier work when you throw umpteen gifted superheroes into the mix? Hmm I'm honestly not sure it does.
On the note of characters there was without doubt some superb character moments with the introduction of Black Panther which I thought was really well handled & I can't wait to see more of him, in supreme comedic form are Ant-Man & Spider-Man pretty much bossing the films entire humor, although Stark does gets a few quips in & Falcon who as a character is really growing on me (there's a nice moment in a car with Bucky), the film does though always seems to be on the brink of character & plot overload but it just about manages to wrangle all it's components in to still tell a self contained story if still with humongous glances towards future Marvel Cinematic Universe films.
Ultimately though this is exactly what Marvel is right now, generally slickly made & pretty damn entertaining films whilst trying to juggle an array of characters (although not always perfectly) let's face it it's a miracle these films are as good as they are with the number of things they're attempting to get done, so overall I think it has a few issues but it's still one hell of an entertaining film & I enjoyed many aspects of it