Sunday, April 06, 2014

Winter Soldier

Just got back from Captain America: Winter Soldier. It was very good. It's not so much a comic book movie as a spy thriller with comic book elements, which works well with this particular character. A few basic thoughts:

(1) Chris Evans is as perfect a Captain America here as he has been elsewhere. Johanssen's Black Widow finally gets some serious character room in between acrobatics. Mackie as the Falcon is an excellent newcomer. A surprisingly good minor role is found in Jenny Agutter's Councilwoman Hawley -- we've seen her before, very briefly, in Avengers, and she's not a crucial character here, but Agutter gets one stunningly good scene.

(2) The Falcon didn't quite work out, I think; Mackie plays him very well, but I don't think they've found the look or quite the right use of him. He just seemed thrown in.

(3) The shaky-cam presentation is sometimes a little distracting; at least, there are times when you need to know what's going on but things are happening too quickly and not in a clear enough manner. But on the other side, a lot of the stunts were done by the actors themselves, and that really makes some of the scenes much better than they would otherwise have been.

(4) The movie is through-and-through a sequel, but it is the strongest sequel in the Marvel franchise so far.

(5) There are a lot of little in-jokes in this movie, but most of them blended very well into the background; I'm sure I missed more than a few. Look in particular for the Pulp Fiction allusion.