Television Review

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: Limited Series (2021)

Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes team up for a global adventure.

Taking a different approach to the mystery box creativity of WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier plays more like a standard Marvel blockbuster, only with six weeks to tell a five-hour story. This results in more time to dig deeper into Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) and Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) as characters, but the storytelling also suffers from bad pacing and a feeling it would have made a better two-hour movie by carving off the fat.

Following the denouement of Avengers: Endgame (2019), Sam’s struggling to accept Steve Roger’s offer to become the next Captain America. The legacy of Cap’s famous shield weights heavily on his mind, as the prospect of a black man taking on that mantle feels more like a burden than a blessing. This is primarily down to systemic racism in the US, and it’s to the show’s credit this is one of the key elements tackled head-on through Sam’s character. And it’s not the type of material that could be done justice within the limitations of a cinema experience, which…