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Captain America

Film writer Jake Coyle finds Captain America zippy but hollow.

For the latest Marvel release, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, most fan boys might prefer a Consumer Reports-style product review.

New character introductions: Smooth. Action sequences: Excellent if sometimes lacking finesse. Viewer satisfaction: Likely high. Box-office prospects: Bankable. Teasers for future Marvel installments: Yes, two.

With slick design and plushy interiors, The Winter Soldier is an excellent product. But is it a good movie? Are the two indistinguishable at this point?

Like the recent Thor: The Dark World, Winter Soldier is a sequel to a pre-Avengers franchise starter. The earlier Captain America: First Avenger was a mostly clever period film, set in the ‘40s and awash with a charming WWII thriller nostalgia.

Winter Soldier brings Steve Rogers — the weakling recruit made a brawny Greatest Generation icon, played by Chris Evans — up to present day for a Washington D.C. conspiracy thriller. Fittingly, Marvel has attracted the default hero of such films, Robert Redford.

While Rogers runs laps around the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and jots notes on the pop culture he missed while frozen for 70 years, there’s trouble brewing at S.H.I.E.L.D. Its head, Nick Fury (Samuel Jackson), believes something is amiss with the agency’s latest project: a trio of “helicarriers” that can kill evildoers from the sky even before the evil is done.

It’s in this way that Marvel films use a complicated current-events issue — NSA-like spying — to feign contemporary relevance. It’s the appearance of having something to say. Captain America, a stand-in for a more innocent, noble America, wonders if the helicarriers are like “holding a gun to everyone on Earth and calling it protection.”

But that’s about the extent of such talk in Winter Soldier: a political thriller without the politics. (Be warned: some small spoilers follow.)

Fury, having doubted the project, finds himself a hunted man. Captain America is left to investigate with only a few trustworthy friends: Scarlett Johansson’s scarlet-haired former KGB agent Natasha Romanoff, a.k.a. the Black Widow (an Avengers toss-in, added like a dash of paprika) and Anthony Mackie’s veteran Sam Wilson (a welcome newbie).

The best thing Winter Soldier has going for it is its cast, a uniformly likable bunch, particularly the winning Mackie, whose character dons mechanical wings to become the Falcon. And then there’s Redford, who plays Alexander Pierce, a S.H.I.E.L.D. director.

Redford, naturally, classes up the joint. Like Jackson, he lends a gravitas to the film that it perhaps doesn’t quite deserve.

Directing brothers Anthony Russo and Joe Russo (You, Me and Dupree)

While The Winter Soldier succeeds as finely engineered merchandise built to be crowd-pleasing entertainment, for moviegoers and shareholder alike, it has a shelf life that won’t last much past its running time.