Film Carew: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

5 April 2014 | 10:30 am | Anthony Carew

If you've ever wanted to watch a man endlessly jump through windows, then Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the film for you.



If you've ever wanted to watch a man endlessly jump through windows, then Captain America: The Winter Soldier is the film for you. Let's use the term 'man' loosely, and instead describe Chris Evans a different way: when the film flips from 'drama' to 'action', our titular superhero morphs from wooden to digital; a side of soap-opera beefcake suddenly transformed into a swam of swirling pixels, leaping about in a digital unreality and doing things regular men could never dream. He's not a regular man, of course, he's Cap'n 'merica!: a mightily-chinned relic from the Greatest Generation frozen and rethawed for the Age of Ultron; swapping out the war-movie derring-do of 2011's pleasingly retro-matinée'd Captain America: The First Avenger, for something resembling -dramatically, aesthetically, and visually - a video game.

There's about five minutes of first-day-back-at-school scene-setting for The Winter Soldier: Evans running victory laps around Monument Park, bro-bonding with future jive-talkin' black sidekick Anthony Mackie. Then Scar-Jo shows up in her Black Widow leathers (the film assuming, perhaps rightly, that every human under the living sun has seen The Avengers and thus doesn't need her familiarity with Evans explained; even though, technically, she wasn't actually in the previous Captain America movie), and immediately we're into action-movie mode: Captain America jumping out of planes, killing endless faceless goons, throwing his magical boomerang shield around, and completing Level 1 as Player A.

This is largely how the film progresses. There's comic fish-out-of-water moments about a nerd from the '40s - a living Smithsonian exhibition - out of his element in the contemporary now; what with the pants hanging low and the sneakers untied; his handwritten list of things from the last 70 years he needs to get caught up on including AC/DC, space travel, Steve Irwin, and Thai food. And then there's the alternating action sequences, filled with car accidents, explosions, automatic weapon fire, and some kind of cinematic record for smashed windows. It's bloodless ultra-violence, in which the broken glass and horrifying human carnage are both happily swept aside, each set-piece beginning as if rebooted anew.

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Do we really need to introduce ol' Scar-Jo?

Where The First Avenger took place in the glorious certainty of WWII-era conflict - Nazis bad! USA good! - screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, at work again, take pains to make The Winter Soldier exist in the "digital book" of the 21st century, and use Captain America's old-fashioned values to hold up a mirror on the modern day. "I guess I just like to know who I'm fighting," Evans says, with furrowed brow; his lament one for the bygone age he left behind (he is reunited with a deathbed, geriatric Hayley Atwell, in scenes that resound with sadness: even the most buxom British babes no match for the withering march of time). The first wave of villainous types are rogue terrorists and mythical mercenaries of no known national allegiance, and the evil plot they're serving is, at least in part, a digital jihad; the film filled with all manner of smart-sounding jargon about algorithms and encryption and files and stuff.

Robert Redford, in one of his many scenes of villainous exposition, solemnly intones that “society's at a tipping point,” not merely evoking pop-philosophy for the smart-sounding-ness, but to prophesy that the overpopulated, overtaxed planet is at the precipice of a descent into chaos. And superhero movies, of all stripes, hate chaos; crave, instead, order, or at least the by-the-final-frame illusion of it. Yet, as Cap' must discover, order is another slippery proposition in the online times. When Samuel L. Jackson swaggers on screen as Big Black Cock incarnate, our hero is horrified by the modern-day-security-agency that his employers, Shield (or, as annoying branding-agents insist, S.H.I.E.L.D.), have become; their airborne networks of satellites and drones "like holding a gun at Earth and calling it protection"; the digital era's 'overlords' rather like the dystopian surveillance-state incarnate.

It's such a convincing case that the only way Markus and McFeely can think to make the Marvel Universe's Top Cops not the corrupt villains of ascendant power is to make an even-more-sinister insider-agency within its own ranks; this rogue, clandestine secret-society - oh, you!, Hydra! - having its own evil agenda. In the language of the film's data mining motif, S.H.I.E.L.D. has become corrupted, as if by a virus. Trust - the bonds by which men and soldiers are forged together - has been eroded; so Jackson must go underground, and Evans and Scar-Jo must run for their lives, bantering sexual-tension smalltalk all the while.

You can tell a lot about a man through his handshake.

The titular character from the other half the title, The Winter Soldier, turns out to be an old friend turned Frankensteinian cyborg; the after-the-colon shadow image of the heroic super-soldier. This means that the final showdowns deliver fraternal psychodrama at operatic pitch: this time, it's personal! Directors Anthony & Joe Russo - whose previous film was, no shitting, 2006's annoy-o comedy You, Me And Dupree; their years-since mostly spent working on TV's Community (whose Danny Pudi makes a nerd-servicing cameo) - effectively misjudge the emotional investment the audience may have in both hero and anti-hero; at the pathos that can be wrung from a killing-machine monster who's already laid waste to freeways full of downtown traffic, and the luckless citizens trapped therein.

If Captain America wholly embraced this video-game absurdity - became a commentary on the unreality of 21st-century life - then it could've become a fascinating meta-movie counter to its predecessor's deliberate old-fashionedness (which included a superhero-movie love-story that actually worked). Instead, it giddily breaks windows left and right, sends endless trucks careening into multi-car smashes, and lays waste to whole city blocks, but skimps on the storytelling, leaning on genre clichés and cheap emotional manipulation. Moving like a modern-day blockbuster means, here, not spending the time to invest in screenwriting that might, when the big-shootout-ending climax comes, make a viewer feel something beyond momentary look-at-that-glass-break distraction.