The review
Anthony and Joe Russo's Captain America: The Winter Soldier is stop eight on our road to Doomsday, and it's almost a spy movie. All the intrigue, all the double lives, and in the middle of it a soldier who says what he means. The spies do spy scum, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) sticks to his lane, and it works. The first time Waifu saw it, she walked in with her expectations on the floor (she wasn't big on Captain America, and the two Marvel movies before it hadn't helped), and it turned out very, very good. On the second lap it still is.
Steve is the reason the intrigue has stakes. He threw himself back into soldiering after New York, and now he takes orders from people who file everything under "need to know". Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) is his opposite in every scene: flirting, lying for a living, and trying to find him a date in the middle of a hostage rescue. Waifu's note on Johansson was that she isn't here as a pretty face or a great body; she can act, and very well. I had no objections to any item on that list. But Waifu saved her best point for the man himself:
I'm allergic to Lawful Good paladins, unless it's Regé-Jean Page's Xenk (allegedly an NPC) in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. This one, surrounded by rogues, somehow works. Everybody around Captain America has a cover story, and he's the only one in the movie playing himself. Even Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) gets schooled: Waifu's read is that his S.H.I.E.L.D. had half a foot here and half a foot there, and you can't be partly in the shadows and partly trying to do good. Fury also gets the street ambush, which gave me the line I was still quoting on the couch afterwards: his car lists everything that's broken, he asks what's not damaged, and the computer answers, "Air conditioning is fully operational." S.H.I.E.L.D. engineering knows what matters.
Now the part I came to talk about: the fights. When two superheroes go at it, things can get fake and over the top fast, with magic and weapons from who knows where. This movie keeps its feet on the ground, and it starts early, on a hijacked ship. Steve sneaking through it gave me Solid Snake vibes, if Snake were juiced up on super-soldier serum. Then he squares off with Batroc, a mercenary played by UFC champion Georges St-Pierre, shield on his back, hands up. Then the elevator. It fills up one floor at a time with men who are sweating a little too much, and Steve asks, "Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?" Waifu says it's the scene she'll remember most out of all of them, and it's still great. Whoever handled the choreography did it really well. (Ava says: the fight choreographer was James Young, Couch Dad. He was also the Winter Soldier's stunt double, so he wrote the exam and then sat it.)
And then the Winter Soldier walks onto a highway and takes the movie. He's just so awesome here. A master of weapons: he swaps firearms like he's flipping through a menu, goes hand to hand, pulls a knife, and never once looks rushed. Because both of them are super soldiers, when they get physical it reads as two men brawling, only faster and harder than any two Jason Bournes should, and I love a Bourne fight. Waifu's review of the whole department: plenty of fight scenes, and a lot of guys will love them. Couch Dad loves them.
The new friend is Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), and he's good in the role. I'm a little salty about him, and it's not his fault: years from now he carries the shield in Brave New World, and that movie didn't do him justice. Waifu's ruling is that it's the script writing, and I'll sign that. Her other note: the stranger Steve happens to lap (several times) on a morning jog turns out to be the one veteran who knows where the plot keeps its wings. A tiny coincidence, she says, and nothing big. I say Steve has always been lucky with strangers.
The old flame is harder to watch. Steve visits Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), who has lived a whole life while he was on ice. "Kind of heartbreaking" was Waifu's reaction, and then the look of old Peggy pulled her out of it: like someone asked for an old lady but also needed her attractive, so it comes out fake. She let it slide because it's so little of the movie. (Ava says: good eye, Waifu. That isn't makeup. The effects team filmed an older actress and mapped her wrinkles onto Hayley Atwell's face. Same shop that shrank Steve in the first movie.) Well, I guess nobody's good at everything. (Ava says: ...no comment.)
Above everyone sits Alexander Pierce, played by Robert Redford. Waifu found Pierce very annoying, in a good way (her standing verdict: if an actor can make you hate the antagonist, he's a good actor), and a realistic villain: the world has plenty of people high up in management who hold the power, act good, look good and mean harm. Her one question was about the finale, where he gets a clean shot at the most dangerous woman in the building and doesn't take it. I had the answer: he needs her to fly him out. She accepted my weak answer, and between us, I also think it was terrible decision-making.
The big reveal walked straight into my oldest sequel pet peeve, and Waifu talked me out of it: it's Hydra. Again. Reusing a past antagonist is the lazy move, the "oh, I'm still alive" school of writing, and the first time I saw this I rolled my eyes all the way back to 1945. Waifu begged to differ. A brand-new enemy would have felt like an afterthought (her example was Iron Man 3), and the first movie already promised that if you cut off one head, two more shall take its place. Without this, that line was just somebody trying to sound cool. Now Hydra has been growing like a cancer inside S.H.I.E.L.D. the whole time, and the one who breaks the news is Dr. Zola (Toby Jones), back as an AI that lives on old-school tape reels in a bunker. They made him modern and kept the memory bank ancient, which is the creative kind of comeback. There's a follow-through, and they did it good. Pet peeve withdrawn, for this movie only.
So that's a spy thriller, a martial arts flick and a Captain America movie sharing one runtime without elbowing each other.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier: the spies kept the secrets, the soldier kept his word.
