Virag's Movie Reviews: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

This movie was like a mirror image of The Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy for me.  Unlike the ensemble flicks, about which I expected the worst, my expectations for CA:TWS were pretty freaking high after all the hype, and it did not deliver at all.  I like Chris Evans; he does a pretty good job as Captain America, but the movie felt oddly disjointed.  If they were going for a paranoid, 70s vibe with Robert Redford, they failed.  Redford was in a completely different film and was wasted in the finished product.  The Falcon stuff didn't real jell either, and that whole story easily could have been left till the next one.  One thing I do know is that the flick could have been at least 40 minutes shorter if Cap had killed all the guys who tried to jump him in the elevator.  I know one of them is a secondary Marvel bad guy, but it's annoying as hell to have normal dirtbags survive their battles to the death with a fucking super soldier.  The silly Hydra reveal was useless as well; SHIELD is plenty fucking creepy and evil without Nazis and cyborg assassins.  The whole paranoid, noirish junk would have been way cooler if SHIELD had been portrayed as the dangerous, untrustworthy, extralegal organization without the influence of virtual reality AI Nazis.  Would have made Redford's, that bald asshole, and Gary Shandling's characters more evil, too.  In the end, it looked like there three movies fighting it out on the screen, but none of them was the great film this thing was hyped up to be.