Iron Man vs Captain America

Rating: 7/10 (1 May 2016)

One thing that baffled me about this film was that it seemed as if it was another Avengers movie as opposed to a stand-alone Captain America movie. Sure, The Winter Soldier had a number of characters from the previous Avengers movie (namely Black Widow, Hawkeye, Falcon, and Nick Fury) however Civil War had Iron Man as well, who sort of has a nasty habit of stealing the limelight from the title character. Okay, they were going at each other tooth and nail, but despite it being a pretty decent movie, having Iron Man as one of the lead characters (as well as bringing pretty much all of the other Avengers, with the exception of The Hulk and Thor) sort of takes the thunder away from poor old Captain America.
The plot is similar to the plot that we had seen in a number of the X-men movies, namely that we have a bunch of enhanced people running around causing mayhem and destruction wherever they go, despite the fact that they are actually beating up bad guys. As such the UN decides to step in and establish an organisation that will review each of the actions that the Avengers propose to take. Mind you, they did have an organisation previously – SHIELD, but SHIELD was pretty much destroyed back in Winter Soldier.
However there is a major catch – Captain America isn't all that thrilled with the idea, especially since it means that there will be a human organisation, with human agendas, decided when and where the Avengers will be deployed. As such they suddenly split along the lines of those supporting the registration (led by Iron Man) and those opposed to it. All the while, in the background, we have the Cap's buddy, the Winter Soldier, being set up for blowing up the UN, and the Captain has effectively become a fugitive namely because he is harbouring a known, and wanted, criminal.
I must admit that I quite like the Captain America films: there seems to be something about them that the other films were lacking. Okay, a bulk of the film seems to focus on this huge battle between the opposing factions of the Avengers (all the while the protagonist is looking on an laughing). Mind you, a part of me wondered why the action suddenly shifted from Berlin to Leipzig, but maybe it had something to do with the plane that the Captain wanted being there. It does also raise a question as to whether they had to shut the airport down because there was a huge battle between superheroes going on here.
Okay, it was still basically a load of biff, pow, kapow (which is what most of these superhero movies seem to degenerate into) but it was still quite fun to watch, especially when Iron Man and Captain America are having their big showdown. Oh, and you probably already know this but they've now managed to bring Spiderman into the franchise, which is pretty cool, especially since he still has his big mouth. However when the next Spiderman movie comes out I suspect that the whole how Spiderman became Spiderman will probably be dropped (they've already done two, though depending on the success of upcoming Marvel movies, bringing Spiderman into the franchise will probably end up working a lot better than simply having him in another suite of movies).