Solid, but not that great

Rating: 6/10 (11 May 2014)

"The Winter Soldier" plays the old game of making the former buddy the bad guy, in this case because the Nazi organization that was supposedly defeated in the first film infiltrates the very substance of SHIELD, the organization that should keep such things in check. Predictably, the buddy-turned-evil pawn redeems himself at the end by saving Captain America.
On the scale of such action flicks, this film is competently executed, and has some nice set pieces, such as the intelligent armored SUV that saves Sam Jackson's character. Others are underutilized, such as the 70s technology incarnation of the dead Nazi mastermind as an artificial intelligence data bank. He dies a couple of minutes after his resurrection. And Sam Jackson is predictably resurrected a couple of minutes after his death.
Robert Redford is entertaining as the evil head honcho with a plan to kills a few 1000 people to bring order and peace to the world. These plots always make me wonder. Millions of people that die of hunger or war, due to bad but entirely avoidable political and religious policies, could perhaps be saved by knocking off just the right set of bad leaders. Perhaps this would be more ethical in the long run, a la Vulcan philosophy of "the good of the many outweighs the good of the few..." (Or wait, did that come first in Bentham's philosophical treatise, or in the Bible, or even earlier?)
The fact that one can ask such questions after seeing the film is a good sign, but the film remains full of wooden acting, improbable plot elements, lukewarm musical score, etc. It's smarter than most of the superhero flicks, but still solidly in B-movie territory. Definitely worth a single watch, though, and the 3D was not overdone.