Unfulfilling movie with unimaginative tropes and one big highlight

Rating: 5/10 (16 May 2016)

As an intrigued follower of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and after reading several reviews, I had big hopes for this one. Sadly, I got (mostly) disappointed. Let me explain why.
Movie Structure This movie has a very simple, uninspired structure. Action Sequence - Serious Talk Sequence - Light Hearted Talk Sequence - Evil Guy Does Evil - Action Sequence 2 - Dramatic Talk Sequence 2 - Light Hearted Talk Sequence 2 - Evil Guy Does Evil 2 until about the 4th repetition. There are no real surprises or even mood changes. Its just a ~30min cycle repeated four times.
Character Motivation The main motivation for everything pushing the plot is grief and revenge. More than that, its all grieving widower, parent or orphan. Stark gets all cranky after being confronted with the death of some kid by his mother in Sarkozia which effectively makes him lean towards the supervision. Black Panther gets involved wanting revenge for the murder of his father. The bad guy want revenge for the death of his family and executes it by showing Ironman that the Winter Soldier killed his parents. Not only are those very unimaginative and repetitive motivations, there justification is also every far- fetched. Blaming the Avengers for deaths in Sarkozia is not plausible, as they averted a much greater disaster. But even more, blaming the Winter Soldier for his acts when knowing he was mind- controlled at the time makes zero sense and cannot be justified or explained by "grief rage".
The actual dispute "Do we need to accept supervision or not" moves far to the background, with about 10 minutes worth of dialogue, and even that bit of debate mostly returns back to the grief motivations. Consequently, we don't get any satisfying explanations why some hero chose this or the other side and no one can be really surprised once someone changes sides. This would have been a fantastic opportunity for deeper psychological characterization of the Avengers and what type of hero each of them is. A missed opportunity.
Fail Villain So the villain is all grieving human instead of immortal god, I get that. But he doesn't work as far as I'm concerned. He just doesn't live up to the combined might of the Avengers. Yea, he doesn't fight them directly, but manipulates them into fighting each other. But aren't the Avengers supposed to be a little smart themselves instead of just emotional wracks that gets played on the strings at the dozens? Shouldn't anyone have suspected something fishy?
Even more, the whole plan of the villain is based on gigantic Batman Gamble. The final resolution only works if the exact three characters arrive at roughly the same time at the location of his baiting. But that those characters arrive is, as shown in the movie, dependent on so many uncontrollable elements that the whole plan revolves around a giant piece of luck. Of course, the villain is lucky enough to say at the end "This is all how I planned it". Well, it was a stupid plan and no reason it should have worked.
Unsatisfying End The end of the movie was the most unsatisfying of all Marvel Movies I have seen so far. The end fight was the lamest fight of all, with Ironman, Cap and Winter Soldier just brawling for a while. And then, it just ends. Nothing gets resolved. But no one dies, either, so no dramatic impact at all. The Avengers are split in two fractions and that's it. It feels like a bad cliffhanger for a TV show. Alas, I paid 20 bucks to see it in IMAX and you want something more satisfying than "wait what comes next year" as a resolution for that. The movie simply doesn't deliver on its own, and that's a shame, because the plot is very promising.
Highlights It wasn't really a Captain America movie and more of a (minor) Avengers movie and I liked that. You got to see a lot of cool characters, even though none of them got the deep characterization they deserved. The biggest highlight was definitely the 20minute fight sequence between the two Avengers teams. It was fun, bigger than life Madness and highly enjoyable. Very well choreographed and great, nerdy dialogue and one-liners. If the movie had more to offer than this great part, it could have been a highly enjoyable experience.