CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

Stars: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Samuel L Jackson, Robert Redford, Frank Grillo, Cobie Smulders, Sebastian Stan, Emily Van Camp, Georges St-Pierre, Hayley Atwell, Jenny Agutter, Alan Dale and Toby Jones.
Writers: Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely; based upon a concept and story by Ed Brubaker.
Directors: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo.

Rating: 3/5

The retro-themed warmth of the first instalment is nowhere to be found in the steely follow-up, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a carefully constructed slice of conspiratorial intrigue pumped up by the now familiar photo-realistic effects team. A template-specific movie experience that impresses without engaging, The Russo Brother’s tentpole debut serves its master – the ‘Marvel Movie Empire’ – as diligently as the titular hero serves his homeland.

Hitting its stride with earthbound first- and second-act shoot ‘em up action before devolving into an over-extended airborne finale that confuses grand scale destruction for involving spectacle, Russo’s Joe and Anthony (hot off…um…2006’s You Me and Dupree) offers some smart plotting and a finely etched heroic central figure.

But it also is the first of the Marvel films that suffers from feeling cobbled together from the canon’s visual elements; for all their faults, Shane Black's Iron Man 3 and Alan Taylor’s Thor: The Dark World, cast aside the appealing aesthetic of Joss Whedon’s blockbuster and found their own palettes. Unlike the beautifully distinctive period elements of director Joe Johnston’s The First Avenger, The Winter Soldier too often resembles a generic modern studio pic (notably The Avengers, of course, but also Star Trek Into Darkness and Man of Steel).

The Russo’s do imprint some individuality with a narrative that evokes 1970’s-style paranoid cinema. The ultra-patriotism of Capt Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is tested when he discovers a rescue mission he heads up also carries with it a covert information retrieval element. When he challenges his boss, Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson), the need-to-know nature of his role in the modern military apparatus leaves him seriously doubting his government motivations.

Evans continues to impress in a role that provides him with the most complex and challenging of all the Marvel players. The Winter Soldier allows the actor to explore the dichotomy of his character’s existence; a sequence set against the Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian institute allows Rogers to literally revisit his past and the heroic leading man figure is fleetingly replaced by a confused, displaced refugee from another time.

Alternately, the chilly face of new millennium bureaucratic coldness is Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), a powerbroker in S.H.I.E.L.D. and head of the World Security Council. The casting of American cinema’s ‘Golden Boy’ is an unmistakable callback to the post-Watergate conspiracy thriller era; the most relevant examples are Redford’s own Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men. In Hollywood speak, The Sundance Kid has ‘still got it’; with his masterful turn in JC Chandor’s All is Lost acting as the serious counterpoint to his screen-consuming ‘movie-star’ charisma here, 2013/14 reaffirms Redford as one of the industry’s all-time greats.

With S.H.I.E.L.D. imploding, the Captain and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansen, playing up her sexiness opposite Evan’s buffed but straitlaced he-man) find themselves on the run from both the organisation’s foot soldiers and an assassin known as The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), a Keyser Soze-like killer who provides a link (albeit a tenuous one) to Rogers’ past. Anthony Mackie adds weight as newbie Sam Wilson, aka Falcon, and fans will appreciate small roles for series support players Cobie Smulders, Toby Jones and Hayley Atwell.

The time is right for a resurgence in smart mainstream films that question the actions of our leaders; post 9/11, the primary movie-going demographic is also the most distrustful of government overreach. Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely have delivered a script that melds action movie tropes with serious-minded themes, though not always with the precision required to allow Captain America: The Winter Soldier to fully transcend its genre origins. Ultimately, it is just another comic book movie, and a fine one at that, but it came frustratingly close to being so much more.