Captain America 2: Winter Soldier The overall serious tone of the narrative disadvantageously distinguishes the second “Cap” from the general entertaining and bright paintings of Marvel. There is almost no humor or jokes in the whole film, except somewhere in the beginning about the “fossil” or funny dialogue about working air conditioning or inviting Iron Man to my niece’s birthday. Fortunately, dialogues with references to a single Marvel universe are found here at every turn, as are other Easter eggs: the Stark Industries logo on the wings of the Falcon, the military uniform of the Howling Commandos in the museum, the mention of Stephen Strange, Bruce Banner, Mr. Wich, cameo Stan Lee and Ed Brubaker, as well as the appearance of Joss Whedon.
Nevertheless, Marvel so played in their spy organizations that whether “Cap 2” now looks like an advertisement for the unsuccessful series “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”, or there the latest series are intensely PR Captain in the movie, endless references to each other did not lead to anything good, everything looks like advertising and trailers, instead of a clear disclosure of their own potential. You can even complain that there is too much agent Sitwell in the picture, but Jasper Sitwell is a comic book character, and the more comic characters in the comic book adaptation, the better.
The second “Cap” is actually full of characters. Here, Nick Fury takes an abundant part, even removing the blindfold from the eye, and Black Widow, Maria Hill grabbed a lot of screen time for herself, it seems there is more of her than it was in “The Avengers”. And the above mentioned dialog links are intertwined with the showing of photos of Howard Stark, video chronicles with Peggy Carter and her own appearance, the successful weaving of Arnim Zola with the main plot twist is perhaps the only thing that the script of the second “Captain America” is good, so it is its main twist. About such plots, it is customary to say “the universe will never be the same again”, although it is possible that for such a young cinema-universe with a similar, root-changing twist – a little hastened.
Captain America is probably the best and most interesting Marvel character after Thor. All of Rogers’ honesty and correctness, idealism and patriotism, play with completely new colors when doubt appears on his face. When intrigue begins around, and the truth is hidden under sudden plot moves. The captain is shown here incredibly cool: jumps without a parachute, flies from bridges to roads, breaks through walls and doors like the Hulk, and how the use of the shield is revealed in action scenes – words cannot convey! The action of the second "Cap" proves that the hero with a shield, without a gun (and a sword) is even more capable of kicking the ass of all enemies! The moment with the destruction of the plane looks no worse, the balancing on the wing from Die Hard 4, and the prologue with the Lemurian Star is the best thing in this film! And, returning to the subject of “gadgets”, Cap also got a personal cap bike, rather than just riding a motorcycle, as it was before. And in the third act of the films, the Captain dresses his old World War II uniform - a real holiday!
Gadget opportunities have expanded and Black Widow, Natasha has a very large plot, and she in this picture from the prologue with a run to the finale in the cemetery. The film also introduces a new superhero - the Falcon, and although its local story is less interesting than in comics and cartoons, the Falcon is inscribed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe quite well. And by the way, “Cap 2” was able to show flying mechanical wings before “Amazing Spider-Man 2” (where a similar mechanism will hint at the villain Vulture), and in the bonus scene showed the Scarlet Witch and Mercury before their appearance in the new “X-Men” (where Wanda, in fact, we were not promised ...), in the same scene appears Baron Wolfgang Von Strucker, played by Thomas Kerchmann – waiting for them all in “Avengers 2”. And also in the plot appears Sharon Carter, a relative of Peggy Carter, the girlfriend of the Captain from the first picture, and Emily VanCamp in this role is very cute and cute.
But if with the positive characters of the film things are fine, or at least good, then with the villains here is almost a complete mess. Alexander Pierce, played by Robert Radford, turned out to be a completely unnecessary, not interesting and superfluous character (however, he, like Sitwell, is a character from the comics about S.H.I.E.). His party or something analog could be played by, for example, Senator Stern, who also appears here after Iron Man 2. In the film there are completely non-comic Bones (Crossbones) Brock Rumlov and Batroc the Leaper (Batroc the Leaper) – absolutely fused and worthless characters, completely devoid of relevance, charisma and at least some supervillain features from the comics. Even some agent Jack Rollins came out more memorable and colorful. And the scene where Bathrock forces Cap to remove his helmet - and the worst moment of the film.
But the situation with the villains is saved by the Winter Soldier, not for nothing brought to the subtitle of the picture (and the Russians, who called this film “The First Avenger: Another War” should burn painfully in Hell!). The Winter Soldier is really cool! The whole image, mask, long hair, canonical robo-hand with a Soviet star (there are even Russian dialogues, but you will not hear them in the dubbing, but Natasha in this film, it seems, does not speak Russian). Sebastian Stan played his game even better than Chris Evans did his. The main antagonist of the film is its main advantage! The episode "You are my task" is worthy of all the praise and Oscars of the universe. Already for the Winter Soldier alone, this film can be forgiven all the abundance of scripted files and other completely non-comic villains. A brilliant adaptation of the comic in a brilliant performance, when it comes directly to Captain America and his main rival in this story. Well, the appearance of Arnim Zola, already mentioned above, is also worth adding to the “villainous pluses” of this picture. Zola and the Winter Soldier really saved and pulled on their shoulders this movie to a decent level of coolness!
However, the superhero comic book still takes over the spy sub-thriller. Cap rescues all the “gifted” people on the planet from Hydra’s tentacles, from Tony Stark (yes, he was on the target list) to the unknown Iowa schoolgirl mentioned somewhere in the dialogue. Captain America is the guardian of the freedoms of the citizens of our world, and he has already adapted quite well to modern realities – and a curious detail, for each country of hire, Cap has his own list of “important things” that he needs to see, read or find out.
The second “Captain” has a very bad and mediocre script (but still with a couple of steep plot twists), but an insanely cool villain and a pretty well staged action, except for hand-to-hand combat. A large-scale blockbuster with its advantages still covers the abundance of shortcomings, outweighing in a positive way, and for the most part, a good caste also reveals its heroes as much as possible. The film was far from perfect, but very good movie comics.
7.5 out of 10
Original