If that sounds like some heady socio-political weight for a tent-pole movie starring a serum-enhanced superhero whose uniform is based on the stars and stripes, it is, but directors Anthony and Joe Russo, who are making their big-budget action debut after working primarily in television comedy, keep the film lively and kinetic, balancing out potentially leaden political debates with scenes of furious fighting. Unfortunately, if Captain America has a real weakness, it is that the perceived need to keep the action quotient high results in an overlong movie that has about two or three action sequences too many, and some of those sequences are so anxious to wow us that they simply overwhelm us with firepower. Thus, by the time we arrive at the big climax in which Captain America and his compatriots are attempting to derail plans to utilize three massive airships to target and kill millions of people, we’re just about exhausted.

The road to that climax is long and winding, starting with tensions between Cap and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the director of the defense agency S.H.I.E.L.D. who believes the aforementioned airships are the key to finally keeping the peace. Fury is collaborating with Defense Secretary Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford), whose motivations for ensuring peace through superior firepower are increasingly suspect. When Fury is apparently killed by a team of heavily armed mercenaries led by the eponymous Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Cap finds himself persona non grata after he refuses to divulge information with which Fury entrusted him, to the point that he is declared a fugitive and is hunted down by the very team with which he once worked. Luckily, he has several strong allies, including Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), whose ethical flexibility and history of working for different sides makes her an intriguing foil for Cap’s single-minded patriotism, and Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), an Iraq War veteran who comes out of retirement and dons a pair of massive mechanical wings to earn the name Falcon.

Seeing Captain America pursued by agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., some of whom have nefarious agendas dating back to events in the first film and some of whom are just following orders, gives the film a juicy kick and makes Cap an inherently more intriguing hero, even if his moral universe is just as rock-steady as always. Interestingly, Cap becomes the voice of liberal humanism in the film, questioning the validity of military tactics that are inherently fascistic, even when wielded by “the good guys” (he essentially recognizes what Batman fails to in The Dark Knight).

That slippery line between “good” and “evil” is everywhere in the film: in Nick Fury’s willingness to cross lines if he thinks it’s for the better good, in Alexander Pierce’s political jockeying, and in the very nature of the Winter Soldier, who is revealed (and this no real plot spoiler to anyone who has read anything about the film) to be Cap’s old buddy Bucky Barnes, who was supposedly killed in the first film but was secretly rejuvenated by the evil Nazi offshoot Hydra and turned into a half-mechanized assassin who has been responsible for seeding most of the past half-century’s tumultuous history. He and Cap are, in essence, flip sides of the same coin (which makes one rethink the relation of the names on either side of the colon in the film’s title)—super-soldiers engineered to serve opposing political agendas. The real gut-punch of Captain America: The Winter Soldier is that those agendas, while seemingly so disparate in the era of World War II, are now so close that one can operate inside the other without even being noticed.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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