Captain America: The Winter Soldier – first look review

To many, the end of the last Thor movie felt like the beginning of terminal superhero fatigue. Certainly my own enthusiasm was low for another two hours-plus of complicated nonsense, building up to a wearying effects-splurge climax in which no one important dies. Especially with Captain America, the most white-bread Avenger in the pack.

But the custodians of the megabucks Marvel franchise do something remarkable here; radical, even. They get political. Rather than, say, trying to stop a malevolent super-elf destroying the nine realms of Asgard, these superheroes are suddenly grappling with real-world issues such as national security, civil liberty, and intelligence gathering. It's exhilarating to see.

This sequel gets Marvel out of the corner it had painted itself into with its previous cycle of superhero movies, up to Avengers Assemble, which detailed the formation of Shield. Effectively a high-tech, first-world security council with no democratic oversight, Shield was starting to look rather sinister in the post-Edward Snowden landscape. In Star Wars terms, it's the Empire, not the Rebel Alliance. This movie's masterstroke is to flip the equation and bring the whole enterprise into question.

And who better to question it than Steve Rogers, AKA Captain America? He's not much of a personality, and his super powers are pretty run-of-the-mill (advanced discus throwing – woo), but if there's one thing the Captain can do better than any other superhero, it's represent the patriotic Soul of the Nation. Especially since he's just been defrosted from a time when the nation had a clear idea of what its soul actually was.

So when Rogers casts his 1940s-tinted eyes over Shield's "quantum surge in threat analysis" – a chilling fusion of mass surveillance and drone warfare – and says, "This isn't freedom. This is fear," it's quite a moment.

The enemy here is within, which means no one is to be trusted and everything's up in the air, often literally. It would be a crime to spoil the surprises in a plot that owes as much to 1970s conspiracy thrillers as comic books. It's only a pity the workmanlike execution can't match this thematic boldness. This is, after all, a mega-budget studio movie, not an Occupy-funded piece of agit-prop. The genre still demands its product placement, its high-tech weaponry, its crunching action set-pieces, and the obligatory effects-splurge climax in which no one important dies (that's hardly a spoiler considering they're already talking about Captain America 3).

In terms of star power, Chris Evans is no Robert Downey Jr either, it must be said. He's not even the most famous person called Chris Evans. With his 90s-boyband hairstyle and an emotional range that runs from "a bit sad" to "really quite cross", he tends to disappear into blandness when he's not chucking his shield around.

Burning brighter is Scarlett Johansson, whose Black Widow has fun chipping away at the Captain's old-school earnestness and trying to fix him up with a date. Having played the voluptuous female mascot in this boys' club for so long, Johansson at least gets to be an actual character this time. The supposed baddie of the piece, the Winter Soldier – a sort of metal-armed goth snowboarder – barely registers amid the densely plotted clamour, though he's not the only baddie by any means.

These shortcomings don't really matter, though. The real excitement of the movie is seeing just how far they'll take their political parallels – which is pretty much all the way to a grand conspiracy theory linking current US foreign policy with Nazi totalitarianism. Advocates of the "liberal Hollywood" conspiracy will find plenty of ammunition here, too. In the first movie, an injection transformed wimpy Steve Rogers into strapping Captain America; similarly, this sequel gives the flagging comic-book movie an adrenaline shot of relevance. You've got to hand it to them.