Roaring action and fun

Rating: 7/10 (7 April 2014)

Captain America: The Winter Soldier turns out to be about some guy named The Winter Soldier, rather than Cap himself being a winter soldier (you know, because he was in deep freeze). Well, with that mystery solved, I settled in to watch what has become a rather typical comic-book movie: intelligent, evocative, thrilling, and entertaining.
Here's your quick-and-dirty summary to set the scene; comic-book nerds out there, please correct me if I'm wrong, because that'll prove someone's reading this other than me. The movie takes place after the events in The Avengers. Captain America (Chris Evans) is trying to assimilate into the present day, and he leads an elite forces team. In the opening scenes, his team, aided by Black Widow (Scarlet Johanson), infiltrate a SHIELD boat that's been commandeered by terrorists who have a beef with SHIELD. Cap and the Gang roust out the bad guys, but Cap is somewhat surprised to see Black Widow grabbing info from hard drives. He's soon briefed by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) that SHIELD is involved in a huge defense program called Project Insight: three enormous helicarriers that are linked to spy satellites, the better to knock out threats before they happen. Shades of Minority Report.
Fury has joined forces with the World Security Council and its leader, Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) for this enterprise, and true to comic trope, there's soon skulduggery afoot. It's not hard to see who's treacherous and who's not, but that's part of the fun of these movies, anyway. As a result of the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere, Captain America and Black Widow, along with new superhero Falcon (Anthony Mackie), who sports an exoskeleton with wings and weaponry.
The movie forces Steve Rogers, aka Cap, to face parts of his past that he might be better off leaving alone. His girl from back in the 1940s, Peggy Carter, is convalescing in a home for retired people, Steve's apparently last living link to that past. But Steve's straight-arrow, black-and-white moral compass seems oddly out of sync with the gray areas of the present, which makes Black Widow a great match for him. You know, opposites and all of that.
This is a movie in which secrets upon secrets are revealed, like layers of an onion and often just as odorous. Anyway, although it's not tough for Cap and Black Widow to determine who the bad guys are, stopping said villains is another problem altogether. This leads to several fantastic action scenes, very well choreographed and a treat to watch - even in 2D, or perhaps especially in 2D.
I sat, by necessity, in the second row for this movie, which meant that my head was inclined as if I were talking to a giraffe with an overactive pituitary gland. It also meant that I needed to focus harder on the action before me, because at that distance the illusion of the celluloid tale can more easily be broken. This movie captivated me throughout, pardon the pun, and it's a terrific vehicle for both Captain America and Black Widow, not to mention the slippery Nick Fury himself.
I did wonder, as the plot centers around something that could endanger the entire world, where was the rest of the Avengers squad? Tony Stark is mentioned once (but not Iron Man), and we see a portrait of his father, but that's it for connections to The Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye, and Iron Man. If the world's about to be harmed, you'd think that would rise to the importance level of those guys, right? Okay, that's nitpicking.
It's true that the movie's plot is familiar and that many of the characters, being based on comic-book characters themselves, lack real depth. But these problems are minor, because the action scenes - hey, this is a comic-book movie, not some weepy melodrama! - is so exhilarating. Great care has been taken to curate the Marvel Universe in cinematic form, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier is not only a fine standalone picture but also a elegant lead for the next Avengers movie - not to mention future Captain America movies. Watch those end credits!