Red, white and blooey

Today’s comic-book movies are like low-budget Westerns back in the days of Poverty Row studios like Republic Pictures and Monogram Pictures, despite the vast difference in the money involved. They have millions of loyal fans, and (like those Westerns) they’re never as good as their fans think they are.

2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger was by far the best of the bunch. Now, the Captain, a.k.a. Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), is back in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It’s a letdown from the first movie, and even from the Captain’s appearance in 2012’s The Avengers, but it’s still diverting enough, and all those fans will gobble it up.

Origin stories are always more interesting than new adventures (last year’s The Lone Ranger notwithstanding), and Captain America’s origins were well-told by director Joe Johnston and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley. The writers are back this time, but the underrated Johnston has been replaced as director by brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, veterans of numerous sitcoms and a sprinkling of forgettable features.

They’re out of their depth here, even in a shallow comic-book movie, but Markus and McFeeley are similarly at loose ends. For all three, the motto seems to be “When in doubt, start a fight.” And there are CGI fights galore. Also missing this time out is the supporting cast from the first Captain America, since it was set in World War II and most of the characters died either in combat or during the Captain’s 70-year hibernation.

There is a brief cameo by Hayley Atwell as the nonagenarian Peggy Carter, and a couple of others return—but it would be spoiling the new movie’s few surprises to specify who, and how. By way of compensation, Samuel L. Jackson is on hand as Col. Nick Fury, Captain America’s superior at the secret agency SHIELD. Even better, we get Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff (a.k.a. Black Widow), a partner-cum-sidekick for Steve Rogers. Also along is Robert Redford as a special-guest villain—and that’s hardly a spoiler. A star like Redford isn’t going to sign on to a movie like this to play a nice guy.

(Here’s another nonspoiler: Nick Fury’s death in the first half-hour is greatly exaggerated.)

Captain America originally fought Nazis, but that score is long settled. His new enemies are fellow Americans working for HYDRA, the catch-all terrorist group in the so-called Marvel Universe (a sort of mental theme park for adolescent boys of all ages). These fifth-columnists, led by Redford’s Alexander Pierce, have subverted SHIELD and plan to deploy awesome new technology to kill everybody they don’t like. They figure without Captain America and Black Widow, the Nick and Nora Charles of superheroes. Johansson remains a sexy treat no matter what she does, and here she does well.

As weakling-turned-super-soldier Steve Rogers, Evans remains the best reason to see any movie with Captain America in it. He embodies all the Captain’s virtues without irony, the virtues most Americans once found in themselves. Now that the Dark Knight movies have turned Batman into an icy, misanthropic vigilante; and Spider-Man has been demoted from a likeable high-school outcast to a hostile, mumbling little creep; and even Superman has devolved into a tortured, alienated misfit and cold-blooded killer; Captain America may be the last superhero that filmgoers really like to spend personal time with, who actually shoulders freely and cheerfully the neverending battle for truth and justice.

Maybe it’s only a matter of time before Captain America, like Superman, outlives the time that spawned him and is kept going only by some comic-book empire’s drive to make another billion bucks. He’s already gone from fighting Nazis to a rogue U.S. government (maybe that’s why The Winter Soldier opened in Europe a week ahead of the States). Will there perhaps come a time when Captain America turns against the country for which he’s named? With American movies making most of their money overseas (and with the overmatched Russo brothers already gearing up for Captain America 3), it may be inevitable.

Maybe, at least, Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson will be back.