Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America returns in this sequel to brighten the silver screen once again.  Marvel has found a niche in the movie going experience that is beginning to line their pockets very nicely.  And even better than that, it is a niche that is fairly fresh and not completely outdated or overdone.  Not yet anyway.  The Captain returns with a fresh new set of problems.  He doesn’t know what to do with himself in this new era of human history.  It seems that life isn’t as black and white as it was during WWII.  He now faces moral dilemmas, as well as enemies both foreign and domestic.  What is a super soldier to do?

In the sequel we get to see a spattering of the Marvel heroes including the Black Widow and Nick Fury, and of course seeing, as all the bad guys were killed off in the last movie, there are new bad guys, or are there? An addition to the story line is the Falcon.  Although the Falcon is a dumbed down version of Iron man, he does throw a little bit of a dynamic into the mix.  And thankfully here Marvel doesn’t inundate the viewer with more superhero than they can keep up with.   There are some interesting twists to the story line.  Some are completely expected and others not so much so.  It is an action flick after all.  Amazingly we get to see more of Nick Fury in this movie than in any of the other Avenger movies. It helps to be a fan of Samuel L. Jackson.

There is a lighter tone at times and even though the movie starts out at a fairly good pace it does slow down to try to get the backstory and future cast into place.  Seems like a necessary evil in movies these days.  Overall the flow of the movie is in the right direction.  The pace other than a little bit of a brief slow respite in the “near” beginning stays fairly constant.  The banter between Captain America and Black Widow throws a humorous touch and even maybe a hint of a future love interest, who knows for sure how that will end up.  There are a lot of explosions and a lot of gunfire.  Also we get to see Cap throwing his shield around and having it bounce around and boomerang right back to him.  There is a lot of violence but true to the PG-13 rating not much blood and not a lot of language.

I would recommend this one to anyone that is interested in the whole Avengers universe.  It adds another chapter to the story and continues the story line fairly well.  If you like action movies, high levels of CGI, big explosions, super hero movies and fighting scenes, then you can’t go wrong with this one.  If you are looking for the next IFC classic or for a romantic dinner date than you should probably go back and look at the choices you have made in life.  I don’t recommend this for the smaller children; the loud noises and violence may be overwhelming.  I would say 8-9 year old children especially the boys would appreciate this one, and adults can have fun with it as well.