In fact, little about the film feels like a traditional superhero movie until the climax, which is an unfortunately predictable affair, involving a seemingly arbitrary countdown, 20 million innocent lives at stake, and a video game like quest to insert one thing into another thing in order to prevent bad things from happening. It is, quite probably, the movie’s only major misstep, and feels out of place after a subdued (by superhero movie standards) first two hours. Without this, Captain America: The Winter Soldier would feel like a very different, and certainly no less exciting, movie.

Crashing helicarriers into fictional buildings may seem like necessities for any film with a superhero in it, but…are they? After the wholesale destruction of several blocks of midtown Manhattan on display in The Avengers and the even more gleeful carnage wrought on Metropolis in Man of Steel, well…there’s only so many buildings you can knock down. At this point, the only real surprises would be if cities aren’t destroyed in the course of these superhero slugfests. And this may be the final hurdle for superhero movies to clear in their quest for the legitimacy that is (occasionally) afforded other genre flicks: they shouldn’t be afraid to keep the narrative small when it’s appropriate.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier does its best to hint at the dangers of the unchecked surveillance state, drone warfare, and the not-so-subtle hints that we have nobody to blame but ourselves. Robert Redford’s Alexander Pierce offhandedly refers to the events of The Avengers as “after New York…” but he may as well have been referring to the World Trade Center attacks…but all of this is promptly obscured in another consequence free orgy of property damage. I’m not saying that it’s Marvel’s job to tell heavy-handed moral parables ripped from the headlines, but aside from lessening the impact of a superhero movie that might, for once, actually have something to say (rather than something fun to show us…which is just fine, mind you) it also distracts from what is otherwise a significant development in the Marvel film universe, one that not only casts previous events in a new light, but will have major consequences for future films and TV shows: the dissolution of SHIELD.

How much of Captain America 2’s $170 million budget went into that final thirty minutes? That money could have been better spent shoring up a few other less-impressive CGI sequences earlier in the film. The time could have been better spent establishing the depth that HYDRA has infiltrated SHIELD and the scope of the real threat that an organization like that headed up by an individual like Alexander Pierce would be. It could have freed up space to use flashbacks (rather than expository dialogue) to detail more of the Winter Soldier’s career, and perhaps develop more parallels between the PTSD that men like Sam Wilson, Steve Rogers, and Bucky Barnes all deal with, something that was also touched on in Iron Man 3. Among the other achievements of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the ability to create relationships and character beats that stretch across franchises, and with success after success under their belt, they’ve earned the right to take chances.

It’s not like there’s any shortage of action in the first place. The opening mission, involving Captain America and Black Widow tearing through a shipload of hapless terrorists, feels not only authentic, but helps to remind audiences of what happens when enhanced and highly trained humans go up against regular jerks. For movie fans, this sequence, as well as Cap’s Bond/Bourne like pursuit of the Winter Soldier that takes him over desks, across ledges, and through walls, are as well executed and exciting as any action movie connoisseur could hope for.