A Captain to Die for!

Rating: 7/10 (2 April 2014)

Captain America's second strike most of all impresses with hand-to-hand martial art fights, almost too fast for the 3D Camera to capture, and well-timed, old school handmade action scenes such as car chases, machine gun shootings on open streets, and spectacular explosions, using less computer generated special effects than other comic adaptations and refreshingly getting along without a Tesseract or similar plot devices to bring the story forward because this time we are presented with a kind of happy-go-lightly mixture of a classical espionage thriller a la "Bourne Supremacy", a touch of "Die Hard"-one-against-them-all scenario, a little bit of "Terminator"-menace, and of course the usual "Avengers" references like bombastic airship battles that all in all make "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" a quite entertaining and light movie experience.
The characters are very likable especially the supporting cast with Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow and Samual L. Jackson as Nick Fury who all together upstage the main hero Chris Evans as the "Cap." who begins to thaw only towards the end from his long winter sleep by showing some hidden emotions that seemed to had been frozen inside of him which gave that melancholic touch to his character making him sometimes appear rather pale although it at least prevents him from being a silly chatterbox like some other heroes. In contrast to that lies Black Widow's mysterious aura and sex appeal; an ice-cold femme fatal who is good at fighting and who also has a very human, if not fragile side which makes her approachable and even more charming; she would have deserved an own movie franchise because it's about time for female hero's to be in the front line.
Robert Redford as a kind of dubious head of S.H.I.E.L.D is unfortunately visibly unchallenged by his role, his motivations are rather caricatural.
A definite plus is the main villain, the titular Winter Soldier who is physically equal to "The Cap.". He reminded me of the evil cyborg in "Terminator 2" with his robotic arm and his threatening charisma. They both do not talk very much and whenever the Winter Soldier appears, he seems to trigger his own gravitational field as the camera seems to revolve around him like a satellite giving his character this sense of heaviness which even more underlines his dangerousness and yet there is a secret human core that makes him more ambiguous than which is the case with most of the usual cyborgs. Plotwisely "CA: TWS" surprises not with the rather predictive twists but with a rather naive, but nevertheless charming comment on the current issues with data abuse by intelligence agencies and the question of how far a society is willing to give up their freedom for the sake of security in the face of a potential terrorist attack, and thus it is probably the most socially critical release of Marvel so far.
It may lack of the necessary psychological as well as artistic depth and edginess of a "Dark Knight" that would have left a deeper reverberation with the viewer, it is also not as unique in terms of style as the first part, however, it is good enough to be recommendable, especially to Marvel fans.