The Winter Soldier is Captain fantastic
FILM
CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER
Cert 12a | By Melissa york
Four Stars
CAPTAIN America is no one’s favourite Avenger. He’s a white bread, vanilla, all-American goody-two shoes. Born of a genetic experiment to create the perfect soldier during WWII, he doesn’t even have any real super powers other than being able to beat people up really well. Like Thor, he’s helped out enormously by a super strong object (his shield) but, unlike Thor, he isn’t also the Nordic God of Thunder. As Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man says in Avengers Assemble, “Everything special about you came out of a bottle.”
While the first film, with its sepia-tinged 1940s aesthetic, was great in spite of its material, the sequel has the seemingly impossible task of separating a mediocre superhero from his creation story and making him seem relevant in a modern, post-Avengers world. But, incredibly, The Winter Soldier pulls it off.
Steve Rogers returns as Captain America, looking so strapping and pristine that I think he might actually have been created in a lab somewhere. He’s joined by Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff AKA the Black Widow, a former KGB spy turned assassin for SHIELD. The specialist agency was set up in the first Avengers film as an extension of the CIA that unites superheroes to fight the forces of evil. But SHIELD has been corrupted from the inside so Captain America, Black Widow and new ally the Falcon, played by Anthony Mackie, are forced to become enemies of the state to bring the organisation down. And all the while they’re being hunted by a mysterious state-hired killing machine known only as The Winter Soldier.
Captain America is re-imagined in the role of an outsider rather than patriotic moral backbone of a nation, bringing darker tones out of his character and generally making him more likeable.
It even gets surprisingly political, questioning the validity of mass surveillance and drone warfare. It’s a real masterstroke in terms of plot, not only for this film, but for the entire franchise.