The Bourne Avenger

Rating: 8/10 (31 August 2014)

Who'd have thought Captain America would actually work as well as it has? Everyone was a little sceptical about how well a modern day version of Captain America would work on today's cinema-going audience, but, to many people's surprise, all of the 'Cap's' outings have been successful. And this is no different.
Although, it is a little different in as much as the film-makers are doing their best not to make it just a generic clone of every other recent Marvel superhero movie (and let's face it many of the latest crop of Marvel movies do follow a bit of a template). Instead, it decides to use a different 'tried and tested' film format – the 'Bourne' movies. We've all seen Jason Bourne being wrongly accused of something and then finding himself pursued across various cities by the people he was supposed to be working with. Well this is one of those films (only with superheroes instead of spies). Poor ol' Cap finds himself doublecrossed and 'outed' as a bad-guy. Therefore, he has to team up with (fan-favourite) 'Black Widow' and some guy he met in the street (who we later discover is 'Falcon') to prove himself innocent (not to mention take down the REAL bad-guy who you'll work out who he is loooong before the on-screen characters do!).
Yes, it may be a bit of a copy of the 'chase' movies, but it's still pretty good if you're into your Marvel universe. For a start we get to see the Cap doing what he does best a lot more than the first movie, i.e. kicking bad-guy butt. In the first movie, much of the action was kind of glossed over and they used montage sequences to portray the fact that he was out there hurting villains. Now, we get to see him hurt the right people more.
Of course it's not perfect there are some plot devices that are a bit overused. The main one being people who 'die' only for it to be revealed later that they actually hadn't. And, possibly mainly, is the title. Here we're watching 'Captain America: Winter Soldier.' Only the titular 'Winter Soldier' doesn't really show up that much. In fact you could probably watch the whole movie and the Cap would have plenty to do without ever having to face his frosty foe.
So, if you can ignore plot holes from former films (like the 'Avengers') regarding why Tony Stark didn't learn of Hydra's existence when he downloaded 'every dirty little secret SHIELD possessed,' you should enjoy this film as a decent entry into the Marvel/action/adventure/spy-chasy-type movie universe.