by Forest Lewis

An early memory of mine has it that during Sunday school the Sunday school teacher herded us four year olds into a closet to show us a large poster of Marvel’s Captain America. This was Captain America of the early ‘80s. His outfit colored the very same bright colors as the American flag, and curiously, the blue and major portion of the costume having little fish scales. Garish, campy, enormous and triumphant, this was Reagan’s Captain America. I assume now that this memory is the work of the imagination; I doubt it ever happened. Even so, I was transfixed, and am transfixed still by this image.

So this most recent incarnation of Captain America is a transgression of my childhood idolization. The movie is Captain America: Winter Soldier, and it’s boilerplate action stuff, marked with the signs of the Avengers Universe. Winter Soldier, though markedly better than its predecessor, Captain America: The First Avenger, is still a collection of standard issue action clichés followed by obligatory explosions.

The movie encounters Chris Evans’ Captain America as he plumbs the depths of treason in the State Department. It turns out that SHIELD, the NSA type intelligence/defense agency, has suffered a Nazi (HYDRA) infiltration and Captain America can now trust no one and must go on the lam. SHIELD begins a plan to save “civilization” by invading privacy, predicting future crimes and killing a lot of innocent civilians. This is “wrong” and Captain America will do whatever it takes to stop them—or almost whatever it takes; his own old-timey moral code prohibits certain decisive actions.

Robert Redford is here and provides the movie with venerableness and higher order filmic allusions, re: Spy Games, All the President’s Men. Samuel Jackson is his usual cartoony self + plus Pulp Fiction in-jokes—Jules didn’t just walk the earth, he lost and eye and became Nick Fury. He plays much more than a bit role and helms a fine car chase, also the best scene in the movie.

The movie is watchable (I did have two doubles of whiskey beforehand: it helped). One recognizes in equal parts, the Bourne series, Mission Impossible III, Band of Brother’s style army schmaltz, and the dumber moral ambiguities from spy movies. We are queued to themes of freedom and patriotism by some French horns sounding over the sunny cityscape of Washington DC. Obligatory black friends are employed. Voluptuous comic-book bottoms are depicted.

These bottoms, however, kick ass. One rather orange Scarlett Johansson provides the movie with an amount of saving grace, for she is someone who is clearly having fun: she knows she’s smarter than everyone else. One can well imagine that ten years down the cinematic highway we’ll only remember Captain America: Winter Soldier as “that one ScarJo starred in between Her and Under the Skin.”

But despite the movies general competence, not much seems to adhere. The altogether vanilla Captain America may himself be to blame. Chris Evans’ dopy beauty remains dopy throughout. His naiveté, though touching, is inert and lame. One wishes that he would brood every once and a while. His role in The Avengers was amusing and necessary, playing the corny straight-man to the other leads. Here it seems, his character can’t supply the movie with the urgency it wants. (I can’t help but imagine that in a more interesting Marvel Cinematic Universe, the powers that be would have cast Jamie Foxx as Captain America. Those movies would be dynamic. One can only dream.)

This movie, though, doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. The Avengers succeeded by deference to its source material, both in mood, and in image. This movie seems to want to be something more and can’t pull it off. Every time a character said “Captain America,” I winced. And not because of camp either: the trouble is that the movie is not quite campy enough.

In any case things are generally forgettable. It’s with large-budget, bland movies like these that, aside from one’s wasted two hours, one begins to wonder about the movie’s carbon footprint, its cubic yards of landfill. Did this movie really have to be made?

My favorite moment of all the Marvel movies is the opening of Marvel comic stills flipping in quick succession. Too often this makes a promise that can’t be fulfilled. In contrast to movies, the static images of comic books are able to take on a peculiarly religious significance, they have access to the same aesthetic power of the illustrated Christ of iconography. Comic Book movies win or lose by their tacit understanding of the source material: the comic is the Torah, the movie mere commentary. The best Comic Book movies know exactly how much weight that original static image has. Captain America: Winter Soldier, does not.

Forest is a carpenter/writer living in Minneapolis. He writes a weekly horoscope for Revolver. Those can be found here. Follow him on Twitter @interrogativs

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