Back when Marvel was still making good content, Captain America: Winter Soldier quickly rose to be one of my favorites. The first Captain movie was kind of slow. Entertaining enough, but average, not great.
This movie really turned the series around though. Action packed and filled with good personal storylines, there’s nothing but excellence crammed into the 136 minute runtime, which actually goes by really quickly.
This is one of my favorite fights from the film. It’s the first time we get to the Winter Soldier in action, and it’s awesome. The character look is perfect – the long hair, the mask, the metal arm, the black armor. The knife work is subtle here but it’s my favorite part of this scene. That’s actually Sebastian Stan doing all of those knife tricks – he said that he trained for months at home, constantly carrying a practice knife and flipping and twirling it all the time until doing all of those fancy moves became second nature.
Winter Soldier ended up becoming a great character in his own right, and this movie was a perfect introduction to Bucky.