The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Expect fun in actionheavy ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’
Expect fun — not artistry of ‘WandaVision’ — in action-heavy 2nd Disney+ MCU series ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’
If you sat down for the first episode of Disney+’s “WandaVision” in January expecting something a lot like the action-packed fare the Marvel Cinematic Universe had been bringing to the big screen for years, you were in for a surprise.
While the tremendously crafted limited series did eventually offer some of that, it spent much of its time paying tribute to several decades of TV sitcoms with a thoughtful and highly artistic touch.
“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” has no similar ambitions.
This second MCU series for Disney+, debuting this week with the first of six weekly episodes, brings the action almost from the jump.
And we mean jump literally.
Before he falls backward out of a U.S. military plane that shouldn’t be approaching Tunisian airspace, Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) — better known to the world as The Falcon, a member of super-team the Avengers who soars through the air via state-of-the-art mechanical wings — he’s told he needs to be subtle in his handling of a delicate mission.
“Subtle,” he says. “Got it.” What follows is, of course, not subtle, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” delivering an action sequence involving Sam dealing with helicopters, machine-gun fire and even missiles.
Before that, though, we see Sam with the star-emblazoned shield synonymous with Captain America, passed on to him by an aged
Steve Rogers in the waning moments of 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame.” Sam seems as reluctant about possessing it as he did about accepting it from the man the world knew as Cap.
The other namesake character of this limited series, Sebastian Stan’s Bucky Barnes — aka The Winter
Soldier — is having issues of his own. He is in government-mandated therapy and trying to make amends for lives he took during the events of 2014’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier.” He’s doing the best he can with all of it, but it’s a struggle.
“The Falcon and the
Winter Soldier” is set a few months after the Blip, which saw half of the earth’s population reappear after vanishing for five years, Sam and Bucky counted among the returned.
Like so many others, they’re trying to find their places in a world that moved on from them.