Captain America - The Winter Soldier (2014)

Time for Captain America to get his second solo outing. After a couple of relatively disappointing solo films following The Avengers, had the MCU lost the magic of their first 5 films? Could they recover it? In my opinion Captain America – The First Avenger, stood second only to The Avengers in terms of quality, so the expectations were high. It was going to be a challenge though, because the first film had the backdrop of the second World War, and support from characters like Peggy Carter and actors like Tommy Lee Jones. In his other appearance in the modern day, Steve had the advantage of being in an ensemble cast and having their characters to bounce off. This time he carried the film and it was set in the current age.

Captain America – The Winter Soldier was a game changer, and I rate it as the second best of the MCU films, it’s almost impossible to knock The Avengers off that perch for me.

Chris Evans saddled up as Captain America again. An aged up Hayley Atwell played a Peggy suffering tragically from dementia in a small role. The interesting decision was made to pair the boy scout persona of Steve Rogers up with the dangerous and morally conflicted Natasha Romanov wonderfully portrayed by Scarlett Johansson (I still can’t understand why she hasn’t got a movie of her own and saying that she’s the co-star of The Winter Soldier, which she is, doesn’t really cut it). Samuel Jackson returned as Nick Fury and had quite a significant part. Interestingly Sebastian Stan also came back, despite Bucky having been killed in Captain America.

Smaller roles were taken by Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill (I love Maria and wish they’d use her more), and Stan Lee once again had a cameo, this time as a security guard who finds Cap’s uniform missing from its exhibit. Jenny Agutter reprised her role as a member of the council. Powers Boothe was replaced by Alan Dale, so the Australian connection remained, although Dale is originally from NZ.

New characters on the side of good were Sam Wilson (aka The Falcon) played by Anthony Mackie and Emily Van Camp as Agent 13 (aka Sharon Carter), written in as a love interest for Steve, and how surprising she just happens to be related to Peggy!

A few bad guys returned: Toby Jones’ Zola came back in quite a surprising way, and confirmed that the Allies should have found a way to have him conveniently die in custody when they captured him. Maxmilian Hernandez’s Agent Sitwell came back and we saw his true colours as an agent of Hydra, same went for Gary Shandling’s crooked Senator Stern.

It’s a measure of how big these films now are that they could sign Hollywood royalty in the form of Robert Redford and cast him as bad guy Alexander Pierce. He was absolutely brilliant and the way he casually shoots his housemaid for seeing something she shouldn’t have is chilling. Frank Grillo played SHIELD turned Hydra operative Rumlow (readers of Marvel comics would see that Brock Rumlow would become villain Crossbones from his final scene). Another SHIELD/Hydra operative was Aussie character actor Callan Mulvey, he specialises in playing mean looking types. I appreciated seeing Georges Batroc as played by Georges St Pierre. Not sure if Batroc will return, 

but I remember him as admittedly a 2^nd rate villain, but a fun one.

The Russo brothers directed and while I hadn’t heard of them before I have to admit that they were the best directors of an MCU film since Joss Whedon helmed The Avengers.

The reintroduction of Hydra and showing how they’d insinuated themselves into every level of government and law enforcement worldwide, especially in the US, was a game changer for the MCU. It didn’t just affect this film. It reverberated through the storyline of the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D TV show and turned it from a fairly lightweight, pedestrian affair into something else different and much better. It also came up during the 3^rd Captain America film, Civil War and will continue to run through the films going forward.

The Winter Soldier is a very different film for a superhero film. It was as much tight, action packed, modern day spy thriller as it was superhero film. There was cross and double cross, it featured spies and had secrets from the past re emerging to affect the present. It was rather like a Daniel Craig era Bond film with superheroes added.

There was great chemistry between Natasha and Steve and I’m really not sure why they didn’t follow this up, rather than trying to pair Natasha up with Bruce/Hulk and Steve with Sharon. Both pairings are extremely forced and as a result don’t come across as particularly believable.

Just like with The Avengers this was going to be hard to top and while the MCU’s next move in trying something completely different was surprising, I think it meant that they wouldn’t make the same mistakes they had made in how they tried to follow up The Avengers.