A Grey, Bland, Dud. In Other Words, "An Exemplary MCU Masterpiece"

Rating: 3/10 (25 June 2019)

MCU fans will tell you, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is great. Better than great. The internet is clogged with reviews from endless Youtube pseudo-critics and Marvel shills whose entire cinematic knowledge stems from Breaking Bad and The Dark Knight, calling The Winter Soldier a game-changing masterwork. It is not. It's every bit as dull and uninteresting as every other ephemeral episode of The Marvel Cinematic Money-printing Machine. And it's aggressive mediocrity is yet another piece of evidence in my continuing theory on MCU apologists; they're idiots.
That's harsh, I know. Some fans out there are perfectly content admitting that a movie like The Winter Soldier offers only disposable pulp thrills. However, it's the people claiming The Winter Soldier as 'innovative', or 'revolutionary' that really irk me. The chief reason given by these idiots is that Captain America: Winter Soldier is a superhero movie that is also a "70s political espionage thriller". Let's break it down. Yes, Captain America 2 contains elements of political espionage. The storyline involves two political organizations, S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra, a covert assassin (The Winter Soldier, Sebastian Stan), and Robert Redford (He's from the 70s). This is called window dressing. Surface decorations that evoke the feeling of a conspiracy thriller. What The Winter Soldier does not have is the actual structure of a political thriller. It's an efficiently made, TV-style superhero flick. The good guys punch the bad guys, the cars crash into each other, and the big CGI heli-carriers crumble like peanut brittle.
There's nothing wrong with a superhero movie that only does these things. A schlocky action movie can be very enjoyable on that basic level, but only if the film embraces its core identity. When a movie like this fails, it does so because it wastes energy trying to be something else. Captain America: The Winter Soldier pretends to deal with issues. It pretends to be about real figures. But it's pretend. S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra are made-up, and as much as directors Anthony and Joseph Russo want you to recognize these things as analogous to our real institutions, you can't when it's all connected to a silly comic book world where a guy named Falcon flies around blasting machine guns at faceless goons.
The cost of this focus on being a half-prestige picture is that nothing is allowed to go over the top. Want more proof that this film's champions are idiots? Look at the fight scenes that they praise as masterclasses in filmmaking. A fist fight in an elevator. Revolutionary! Look at those punches and kicks! It's unlike any other film I've ever seen! A fist fight on a highway. Brilliant! Hand to hand combat! Never before has a hero used his fist to punch another man! #Masterpiece! I can't be living on the same planet as these people. The action in Captain America 2 is not only not revolutionary (That is extremely obvious), it's flat-out bad. Hand to hand fist fights are usually boring by nature. It takes a real master of film craft to overcome the blandness inherent in such a scene. Cameron can do it, Raimi can do it, The Russo Brothers can't come close. There is absolutely no sense of invention in the action. No passion. No ideas at all. Just punches, filmed with detached digital murkiness.
I can't think of a better way to describe Captain America: The Winter Soldier. The whole thing is detached. It's a filler TV episode. Efficiently produced, with the façade of something meaningful, but completely uninterested in personality, life, or genuine fun/excitement/thrills. It's boring, transient garbage that managed to fool stupid people into thinking it was great. Well idiots, you get what you deserve.
31/100