Captain America: The Winter Soldier, review
Has the Marvel franchise become too swollen with its own success? Robbie Collin reviews the hotly anticipated Captain America sequel, starring Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson
Dir: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo; Starring: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Redford, Anthony Mackie, Toby Jones, Hayley Atwell. 12A cert, 136 min.
To make a Captain America film, first you have to solve the Captain America character: work out what he stands for, and, by extension, what America stands for too.
For Joe Johnston, the business was straightforward enough. His 2011 Captain America picture was the fifth juggernaut in the ongoing Marvel Avengers convoy, and took place almost entirely during the Second World War. In it, the Captain, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), was a rippling pastiche of a military hero, who waged war in freedom’s name against grim men in black trench coats – Hydra, rather than the Nazis, although you suspect they shared a tailor – and fought with a moral certitude that was supposed to strike us as charmingly dated.
This sequel unfolds almost entirely in present-day Washington DC, where freedom is less of a defendable ideal than a political sales-pitch. Your first clue that something might be afoot, providing you’ve seen Three Days of the Condor or All The President’s Men, is the presence of Robert Redford, who plays a beaming director of the SHIELD intelligence service, and whose DC office block – no more than a hop, skip and jump from the Watergate building, you suspect – houses three state-of-the-art drone gunships in its basement.
The US government plans to send these craft to the Middle East, where they can bullseye suspicious cave-dwellers from on high, which Rogers can’t square with his own, more honestly swashbuckling sense of patriotism.
“I thought the punishment came after the crime,” he tells his commander, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). “We can’t afford to wait these days,” comes the barked response. More than ever, Jackson here has the cast of an angry pillar box, and in some scenes in The Winter Soldier he seems to transform into a column of pure, compacted rage. First, though, come suspicion and panic: Fury uncovers a conspiracy relating to the drones and becomes the target of an elite assassin, the Winter Soldier, whose own masters (to anyone in the film, at least) are not immediately identifiable.
Zingy stuff, you think: the winter soldiers were a real-life group of Vietnam veterans who sought to publicise American war crimes in that conflict in the early Seventies, and the film’s invoking of that movement, along with its allusions to drone strikes, NSA eavesdropping and the Pollack-Pakula-Coppola surveillance-thriller cycle, suggests a new boldness from Marvel Studios.
Having gathered up these combustible reference points, though, The Winter Solider packs them tidily into a box marked "window-dressing" before moving on. As Rogers bounces from one clue-gathering site to the next, the film summons up no real sense of paranoia, or even that much is at stake. The film’s thundering centrepiece, a mass shootout in broad daylight, borrows heavily from Michael Mann’s Heat, which is fun in the moment, but an untidy fit with the plot.
The directors are Anthony and Joe Russo, who came to the project from a string of television work and the romantic comedy You, Me and Dupree, a picture you feel really would have benefitted from a Heat-style mass shootout in broad daylight. They bring a flatly televisual look to the film, but also television’s understanding that supporting characters can be more than plucky sidekicks. Scarlett Johansson, returning as the double-agent Black Widow, is handed the most (the first?) complex female role in the Avengers franchise to date. Meanwhile, Anthony Mackie’s Falcon, an ex-paratrooper with a wing-sprouting rucksack, cleanly justifies the film’s use of 3D in a series of swooping sky-ballet action scenes.
Still, you can’t help but feel disappointment that a film with a relatively spicy premise becomes, in the end, so risk-averse. Is it possible for a franchise so swollen with its own success to still find room for creative bravery? Time, money and the four more Avengers films currently in production will tell.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier opens on March 26
READ: