The first Avenger is back in the latest release from Marvel studios, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Now working for SHIELD, Cap continues to struggle with finding himself a man out of his own time. He's got much bigger concerns though, namely the titular assassin, a mysterious figure who has terrorised America and her allies since the Cold War.
The first Captain America film made the most of it's period setting to distinguish it from the rest of the Marvel flicks. It gave it an enjoyably old-school atmosphere, feeling like a classic boy's-own-adventure type yarn. With the end of the movie (spoilers) bringing him into the present day any sequel was always going to have to take a somewhat different approach. With Winter Soldier they decided to go down the spy thriller route, and the end result somewhat resembles a Bond movie with Super-powers (with a dash of Bourne for good measure). Much as every Bond film starts with a pre-credits action scene, Winter Soldier kicks off with a thrilling first-reel action sequence involving a rescue mission on a ship hijacked by pirates. The action is exciting and well choreographed throughout, keeping up the high standard seen in most Marvel productions to date. A lot of the action is surprisingly down-to-earth too, with plenty of old fashioned hand-to-hand combat and gunplay inbetween the comic-book super-soldier smackdowns. That's not to say there's not plenty of the completely fantasy-based stuff in the mix too, but this is certainly closer to the likes of Iron Man 3 than The Thor movies. The action is expertly mounted, and there's much less of a reliance on CGI than in many of it's predecessors.
