Foot Races Are the New Car Chases

Let me tell you about a hot date I went on with my wife. No, this isn’t Mama Sparkles. It’s Hubby again, with a guest movie review of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. I say “hot” because we’re talking about an action movie sequel and on a funny side note, it was announced before the screening that it would be “overwhelmingly loud,” so it could’ve been “hot” in that the theater speakers nearly exploded. My wife says my reviews have too many tangents and my sentences are too long, so I apologize for that.

Back to the movie, anyone going into any sequel wants two things (whether they realize it or not): something (1) more and something from (2) before. It’s obvious that by “more” I mean more action or comedy, bigger budgets and better special effects. But a successful sequel shouldn’t just expand on top of the original movie, it should deepen its roots. By “before” I mean character background that precedes the original movie without contradicting it, context as opposed to content.

Captain ‘Merica (as the guy sitting behind me pronounced it) definitely has more action and more comedy. Where the original movie had (spoiler alert) a death at the end, this sequel starts off with a death and who doesn’t love a good murder mystery? There’s a deeper political context this time around (although I’m going to leave that open for you to interpret how you will) and most importantly (to me anyway), the relationship dynamics between Cap (Chris Evans) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) are deepened.

Yes, The Winter Soldier makes for a hot date. I say “hot” because we’re talking about some good, old-fashioned sexual tension. If you don’t care about superheroes but you do like romance, you should still watch this for something that I never saw coming. At first I didn’t get it (typical aloof guy that I am) when the superheroine kept trying to set our hero up with different people. By the time they reach a certain underground bunker (metaphor for “deep”), his all-business-and-no-pleasure mentality becomes apparent for what it really is, her unrequited love.

Be still my beating heart! Not only that, but the actress they got to play title character’s actual love interest, Agent 13 (Emily VanCamp), was always my pick to play Katchoo, the love interest in a Strangers in Paradise adaptation, another comic book movie with love triangles that probably won't get made. Now if you don’t care about other comic book characters but you do like celebrity cameos, you should still stay through the '60s-style
end credits for the DOUBLE ZINGER. That’s right, not one, but two different sneak peeks of future franchise films starring Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (who will both appear in the remake of Godzilla, my most anticipated movie of 2014)! Awww, I’m a nerd, but thanks for reading me on Mama Sparkles.