When you're bleak, you're bleak

Rating: 5/10 (24 September 2014)

With apologies to the writers of one of George Costanza's more memorable tautologies, I can't think of a more apt description of "Captain America: The Winter Soldier".
The excessive gun violence in this movie - most of it without consequence - is disturbing. It makes "Commando" look like a public service announcement from the Brady Campaign. I'm all for 2nd Amendment rights. And the right to eat whatever you want too, but if a movie showed skinny supermodels binging on Pizza Hut, KFC, and Burger King for 2 hours and never gaining a pound, I'd find it similarly unbelievable and irresponsible.
The Winter Soldier himself is, without exaggeration, the least inspired villain since The Phantom Menace. And it's much less excusable in this case, because I think just about everybody expects more from the pages of Marvel lore than they do from the creative mind of George Lucas (at least since the mid-1980s). Hey Marvel, if you're going to drop only the slightest of hints at a guy's origins or motivation, you might want to try making him interesting first.
Apart from a brief opening scene on a ship, and a pointless trip to a training ground in New Jersey, the movie was set entirely in and around Washington, DC. News flash: That may be one of the most boring (and phoniest) settings on the planet, even before you add CGI. The last movie that successfully pulled off an all-DC setting came out over 25 years ago (Kevin Costner's "No Way Out").
Yeah, I know that the trip to the training ground - during which a supercomputer, imbued with the personality of the nebbish from the first Cap'n America movie, attempted a murder-suicide - was supposed to provide vital plot exposition. But good ole Steve Rogers had already deduced all there was to know about the threadbare plot the minute he saw the new heli-carriers (*audible groan* "Not heli-carriers again?")
I guess I'll have to check the FAQs or the message board to figure out what's going on with Nick Fury. I must be too dense to have grasped it. Is he dead, alive, a clone, or what? I'll also have to check with the comic book fans to find out whether Falcon was as forced and unnecessary in the monthlies as he was in this movie.
As for Captain America, the whole series is kind of embarrassing. I mean, Chris Evans is a handsome guy, apparently very muscular now, and likable. But he's already played the Human Torch so why does he get to come back as a different Marvel Universe character just because the Fantastic Four movies sucked? What's next, Tobey Maguire as Mysterio? Then again, Jessica Alba as Spider-Woman would be OK, so never mind.
If you want to watch a good movie about heavily armed aerial urban pacification vehicles whose developers are secretly nefarious, watch "Blue Thunder" instead. You'll save 30 minutes that you can use to go out to Quiznos. I hear they have zero-calorie sandwiches now.