I know it’s late but better late than never. Here’s our review for the Captain America: Civil War movie.
SPOILERS
The Avengers help fight bad guys and it ends bad. This has the United Nations stand up against them and want all super heroes registered. This is put forth to the Avengers and their leader, Captain America, to sign or there will be consequences. At a UN assembly, a bomb attack happens in which the Wakandian King is killed. Everything points to this being done by the Winter Soldier aka Bucky, Captain America’s old, best friend. Of course this leads Captain America & Falcon to find and get to Winter Soldier before the governments do. They do but are pursed and captured with the help of the Black Panther, a legendary hero from Wakanda. During an interview, Winter Soldier is activated by a series of command words and manages to escape with the help of Captain America & Falcon. Knowing that the odds are against them, Captain America gets more on his side with the likes of Hawkeye, Scarlet Witch and Ant-Man. Iron Man build his team by enlisting the aid of Peter Parker aka Spider-Man along with Black Widow, the Vision and War Machine. A big fight goes down between the two sides at a German airport as Captain America and team try to fly off and find the true villain of the bombing while Iron Man and his team are to take down Team Captain America. During the battle, War Machine is critically injured due to the Vision’s mistake which he faltered due to his thoughts on Scarlet Witch. This allows Captain America & Winter Soldier to escape and hunt down the villain known as Baron Zemo. Team Captain America sans Black Window get captured and put into The Raft, a super heroes max prison. Upon the capture of Zemo, they fall into a trap that includes Iron Man and Zemo shows them a video which shows a brainwashed Winter Soldier killing Tony Stark’s parents. This sets off a big battle with Iron Man, Captain America and the Winter Soldier aka Bucky. In the end, Captain America wins and disables Iron Man by leaving what Tony Stark’s father built him – Captain America’s sheild. As Zemo tries to escape via suicide, the Black Panther stops him and wants him to live to pay for his crime, despite wanting to kill the man himself. Captain America and the Winter Soldier escape while Tony Stark has to deal with the fallout. Steve sends Tony a note and a cellphone that if he or the world ever need them (Team Captain America) that they will always be there, just a phone call away despite whatever has happened. In the end, Steve Rogers breaks team Captain America out (Falcon, Ant-Man and Hawkeye), put Winter Soldier on ice until they can ensure he can’t be tampered with again and is last seen with Black Panther in Wakanda.
Robert: I loved it. Plain and simple. I understood ALL the ads & placeholders for the upcoming Marvel movie universe in Spider-Man, Black Panther, Black Widow and whatnot but I still LOVED this movie. I’ll re-watch this movie many a times. I saw past the “it’s more an Avengers movie” or “too much of super arrogant Iron Man in a Captain America movie” claims. To me, it was a great Captain America movie which had a ton of the Marvel movie universe characters. Awesome. The core of Captain America from start to finish worked for me, it was Steve Rogers standing up and taking charge of what he left he needed to do for both the Avengers and his core beliefs.
Ian: I feel like this flick was fighting it’s own nature at times as Steve and Tony struggle to understand that people have actually died yet it’s taken over seven movies for this to kick in. While the first half of the film sets up a serious tone that Winter Soldier has, I’m all for this as Black Panther steals the show with his die hard vendetta for wanting to take out Bucky.
But then, as if the studio heads gently reminded that this is MCU flick and that kids are watching as our newly introduced hero, Panther of Vengeance swears to murder the hell out of Bucky. We get the big bold white text, NEW YORK.
Cue Stark hinting on Aunt May, some quips between not as forced barn yard emotional navel glazing but who cares how out of place it is or that Tony Stark wants a kid that is self trained with six months experience to beat up his former friends? IT’S SPIDERMAN! WOW!
I can’t fault them for this giant toy commercial break that as it’s a bit of relief than Steve and Tony scowling at each other about some villagers that got crushed by Ultron’s giant rock of doom. The airport fight itself has all the classic hallmarks of why people go to see MCU flicks with all the one liners, CGI all over the place and as much hard hitting action one can expect from ode to Micheal Bay’s former domination of summer blockbusters but it just felt so strange.
Especially that it’s fun time is measured by Spiderman and Antman as the last one liner delivered by Spiderman (“Yeah, I’m out”) dials the pace back to being a flirtaious nature of being dour (but not too self involved unlike Batman vs Superman, there’s still kids watching) as Rhodey takes a near fatal hit that looks like it’ll escalate the situation but it really doesn’t in the end. Not to be outdone by the infamous twist that Marvel is using in a coy way in their comics (CAPTAIN AMERICA #1 – BUY IT TODAY), we catch up with Zemo’s grand plan as the red herrings of other winter soldier candidates are seemingly taken off the board.
Steve and Tony fight for real cause dead parent, they do the famous pose from the comic and everyone walks away to set up the next flick. In terms of the Cap films, Winter Soldier was the peak and as fun as the airport fight was, it damaged the pacing the film, taking focus away from building up new characters such as Black Panther and sidelining characters that could use the development to get people invested such as Scarlet Witch and Vision. Sure, Black Panther gets that pretty great chase scene at the start but the focus is always on Tony Stark and throwing in Spiderman just to make things light? Feels like a mandate by the studio as I could careless about yet another semi origin Spiderman flick when the core issues from Amazing Spiderman 2 being bad weren’t with the title character himself, it was with the build up of too much other details being shoved into the film, similar to Civil War’s issue.
Props to MCU keeping Zemo around, most likely to set up another franchise with Thunderbolts but we’ll see how that pans out as the exhaustion of cape films feels pretty apparent this year as Deadpool managed to shake things up but this whole MCU formula is getting stale on the vine. That being said, I hope that the take away from this flick is realizing what doesn’t work and that they don’t need to shove in parts that go against the narrative tone of the film as MCU is very notorious for telling their directors what has happen on film as evident with how Thor 2 turned out is a testament to creative talent vs studio mandates.
Robert: I never understand this about pacing of the movie and taking away from other screen times for Black Panther, Scarlet Witch or Vision AND at the same time condemning the movie for being TOO MUCH LIKE AN AVENGERS MOVIE! Wait a second, if you want to give these characters more screen time and less big Marvel battle scenes (which Marvel is WELL KNOWN FOR both in movies and the original source comic books), you can’t have that same argument. It’s invalid. Either one or the other and then don’t tell me it’s a great Captain America (ONLY) movie when it’s also got Black Panther and others as involved with so much more screen time.
Lastly, one reason I’ll ALWAYS love this movie vs say Crapman & NOTSuperDuperman is the chemistry, charisma and FUN that the entire movie had. It never let go of that, despite how much people want to love or hate all the Ads for next Marvel movies that are in here.
Case in point: Winter Soldier & Falcon as the two buddy cop duo was SO well done in those small, funny scenes that brings one thing to the Marvel movies – heart.
GO CHECK OUT Captain America: Civil War, still in theaters & have a great time!
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