Critics reviews

Winter Soldier inevitably succumbs to the weight of grand-finale spectacle, but it stays buoyant for quite some time, and its merits are undeniable. It is a widescreen movie that has actually been composed for widescreen, a fact immediately apparent in the carefully framed opening... It has lucid, tense set-pieces, including an artfully set-up and staged melee inside a crowded glass elevator, for which much credit must be due to fight choreographer James Young (Raze).

The Winter Soldier has some of the usual problems. It's frankly overlong at 136 minutes. The climax is thrilling but still seems implausible, given that Cap's mission is to change the servers on three heli-carriers... But why quibble, when the film is so solid? On this evidence, Captain America is the Marvel franchise that goes off in bold, unexpected directions to disguise the fact that its hero is so boring. Could be worse.

By bringing in Redford, a titan of the so-called New Hollywood, to shore up its ensemble cast, the studio shows that it hasn't forgotten about the grown-ups in the audience. And by tweaking this sequel to play more like a cloak-and-dagger thriller than a special-effects blowout (though of course there's plenty of that, too), directors Anthony and Joe Russo have delivered an unusually satisfying and substantive superhero movie.

The Winter Soldier" turns out to be more interesting in theory than in practice, more fun to talk about than to sit through. That's a subjective response, of course; it might be fairer to say that the effect of the film is very different from the alleged ideas behind it... This purported anti-fascist tale is delivered in high-fascist incoherent action-movie style, as a dizzying, disorienting farrago of secret weapons, ripped bods, lonely masculinity and individual acts of bravado.

[The Russo brothers have] mastered the multitasking required of any Marvel hire: Their Winter Soldier delivers the requisite pyrotechnics, brightly comic banter, and future-sequel groundwork without breaking a sweat, while still finding room to fold a throwback trust-no-one thriller into its design. That's an Avengers-grade achievement.

It's not bad. Directors Joe and Anthony Russo, heretofore known mostly for directing TV comedies (among them Arrested Development) and the dire Owen Wilson vehicle You, Me and Dupree, keep the action clean and steady. And they mostly avoid the kind of groaningly apocalyptic mayhem that has become de rigueur in blockbuster franchise flicks nowadays.

Given how little creative wiggle room there is in properties like "The Winter Soldier," it's a minor triumph that the Russos imprint any personality on the movie... "The Winter Soldier" becomes progressively less enjoyable once the plot thickens and a menace looms, as Fury moves one chess piece, while Pierce moves another.

The Winter Soldier isn't the worst chapter in Marvel's series... but it's certainly the most disappointing... [The film,] despite one or two moments of Venture Brothers-worthy fancy (e.g. Toby Jones's mad doctor trapped inside a Cold War-era computer monitor), is as by-the-numbers as any this series has ever offered. And the continued success of this unabashedly self-recycling "Cinematic Universe" only hastens the disappearance of choice at the multiplex.

Unless you're intimately familiar with the so-called Marvel universe (or you really love CG explosions), little of this will resonate; directors Joe and Anthony Russo race through everything but the special-effects set pieces, assuming that fans will compensate for the lack of nuance by drawing on their knowledge of the comic books.

The Marvel faithful will turn up for the action scenes, and the directors, brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, add an uncommon sharpness to sequences of urban warfare—these Heat-grade bullet volleys have a real ping to them. But unlike the magically well-balanced The Avengers(2012), there's a touch of character bloat here... Still, this instalment delivers a heavy and welcome dose of paranoia, administered between fleetly paced smackdowns.

The Rip Van Winkle of superheroes goes rogue in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier," an impressively equal sequel to 2011's superb origin story "Captain America: The First Avenger" that trades the earlier film's apple-pie Americana for the uneasy mood of a 1970s paranoia thriller... [The movie is] chockfull of the breathless cliffhangers dictated by the genre, but equally rich in the quiet, tender character moments that made the first film unique among recent Marvel fare...