Awful cinematography and acting, a total ruin of a movie
This is a poor man's comic book movie.
The story is a sham of poorly shot (although at times impressively choreographed) action scenes, sandwiched between badly delivered exposition. What was the matter with the camera man, does he have Parkinson's disease? Did he show up drunk every day on the job? Massive inner ear infection? What was the excuse for such an expensive movie to be shot so poorly? The cinematography in this movie is revolting. So many jump cuts to try and hide the shoddy camera work and shot planning and you know, it doesn't help in the slightest, it still looks like a poorly shot jumble that's trying to hide how poorly shot it was.
The character himself is silly as hell. He would have been serviced better though if they didn't have people with friggin' mini-guns shooting at him with only a little shield to hide behind with no other cover and him not catching a single bullet! That goes from silly to downright laughable pretty quick. Captain America should have dead 10 times over in this movie. And then to make matters worse they do the opposite as well, they have him facing off against ordinary people all throughout the film. Are we suppose to be interested in a superhero fist-fighting with a regular Joe? Is there suppose to be any tension or suspense in that? Because the movie tries to build it up that way, only to fall flat on it's face.
The acting was vacuous and hollow. Samuel L. Jackson gave a totally decent performance (although far, far from being one of his better ones) but the stars of the movie, Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson were flat and uninteresting and had little chemistry together. There is absolutely no expression delivered in either of their eyes, watch them next time you see the movie, they're utterly lifeless. They're really boring to watch. Just delivering dull expository dialogue over and over again in the driest, most uninteresting way possible does not help flesh out your movie or make for memorable characters and scenes.
This was an incompetently made movie, both on the crew end and from the cast. With a different director, cinematographer and a better cast you might have been able to salvage something out of this mess (and with a whole lot of rewriting too, and fixing gross errors like Captain America emerging from a pile of rubble when five seconds earlier he was half a mile underground! ). There's a few nice scenes in the movie but they're not even remotely enough to make this movie passable with all of it's grievous cinematic sins. In short it would have taken a lot of work to make this movie serviceable, it's that bad.
Captain America The Winter Soldier is amateur film-making for an amateur audience.