Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER 
    D: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo               (2014)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Robert Redford,
    Samuel L. Jackson, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan,
    Cobie Smulders, Jenny Agutter, Toby Jones, Stan Lee
In this movie, Robert Redford gets to do what Gregory Peck did in "The Boys From Brazil" and Henry Fonda did in "Once Upon a Time In the West": throw off several decades of often flawed heroes to play a truly despicable villain. He looks like he's having a good time doing it, and that's not a bad reason to watch the movie. I'm normally not a big fan of live-action comic-book recreations, but this one kind of works. Chris Evans, looking digitized to the point of total blandness, plays the hero behind the mask, a World War Two vet who would now be about 95 years old, but, thanks to cryonics and technical wizardry, appears young and buff and can jump out of planes and off tall buildings without a parachute and still not be hurt when he lands on the pavement. The story has the Captain battling an evil organization called Hydra, whose evil commander-in-chief (Redford) wants to control the world by providing its inhabitants with security at the cost of freedom. The action scenes are exciting, and for all the suspension of disbelief required, you actually care about the outcome. There's a decent amount of tension in the storytelling, and the moral arguments that come up are worth having. Plus, there's Scarlett Johansson as a husky-voiced Russian agent, Jenny Agutter in a cameo that's much too brief, Samuel L. Jackson being Samuel L. Jackson, and Redford laying on the charm as he plots the strategic slaughter of 20 million people. The ending leaves most of the characters in play, and even introduces a few new ones. The battle's been won, but not the war, and the sequel's due out in 2016.