Don’t get me wrong, I walked out of Captain America: The Winter Soldier pretty satisfied back in April, 2014. Really cool choreography for the hand-to-hand combat sequences, a pretty fun story and a cool performance from Samuel L. Jackson. I got my money’s worth for sure.
But I’ve never had the urge to go back and watch it again. Any urge I’ve had was satisfied by watching some of the fight scenes on the internet and that’s about it. I once tried watching it again, not out of a strong desire to do so, but just to see why I never wanted to. And now I know why: for a movie that’s touted as one of the absolute best MCU films… it’s kind of dull. Like I said before, the action is spot on and the overall story is a fun adventure but this movie is pretty devoid of anything human or interesting.
Captain America is a pretty dull superhero, and frankly, I find all his solo outings to be pretty dull. Each one is better than the one before it but Civil War is only better because he has to share the screen with some Avengers with more interesting motivations and personalities; other than that, it falls victim to the same bland issues that The Winter Soldier does. I always hear about how this movie finally “challenges” Captain America’s morality. Did I watch a different movie? This movie is about a dude who is morally unshakable, believes one thing to be true and in the end is proven completely right and everyone who tried to steer him away was wrong. Very captivating.
I don’t necessarily need a hardened anti-hero, but it would be nice to have your protagonist… learn? Grow? Change? Homer’s Odyssey is interesting because even though Odysseus is undoubtedly a hero, he is also marred by his hubris, but over time, learns from his mistakes. Captain America is perfect at the beginning and equally perfect at the end.
Look, this movie is light years ahead of the first one, which was legitimately just boring. At least here, we do get some thrills. It’s just a shame that a pair like the Russo Brothers, who are known for directing irreverent comedy television, were relegated to such a soulless script.
“But it does have a soul! What about Cap’s conflicting relationship with Bucky?!”
Who’s Bucky? Oh, the character from the first movie that had no personality or charisma? The character that we barely spent any time with and had no real chemistry with Chris Evans?
I genuinely dislike it when people claim MCU movies are too interconnected and they can’t remember who is who or what happened in previous films; these are movies that are built for mass audiences that really exist to sell toys… the connections between them are really surface-level and can mostly be made without even having seen previous films, based on context alone (I didn’t see Ant Man but I wasn’t thrown in a tizzy when he showed up in Civil War). Having said that, the reveal that the Winter Soldier is Bucky Barnes from the first movie had no effect on me because I genuinely forgot who he was. Now, I understand, some of that is on me. I would argue that Captain America: The First Avenger is maybe not the worst, but definitely the dullest movie in the MCU and I have not revisited it or thought much about it since I saw it. So, the scene where his identity is revealed, is supposed to have a lot of emotional heft and make both Cap and the audience stop dead in their tracks. All I could think was “who cares? Kill him… he’s killing everyone else.”
Bucky Barnes was a slightly duller character in the first movie but now because he’s brainwashed, he is completely devoid of any emotion whatsoever. So now I’m in the middle of a movie where the big emotional pull comes between the world’s dullest superhero and is even duller friend. Thankfully the movie is smart enough to know not to linger on this wasted attempt at emotion and just have them go into a brilliantly-executed hand-to-hand fight.
What really sucks is that all of this supposed “emotion” bleeds over into Civil War, where the film wants us to root for Bucky to get better and reunite with Cap. Once again: I have spent no meaningful time with this character; you are asking me to root heavily for a friendship that I saw a few scattered moments of, that didn’t really even work that well, in a boring movie from five years earlier. If you want me to care, then show me why I should care, but having Cap say “he’s my friend,” over and over doesn’t convince me.
Movie Musings 