Captain America: Winter Soldier, like Dark Knight Rises before it, signals its intelligence through ambivalent allegory. In the Avengers, the supersecret SHIELD spy network is unambiguously good; the government defends our borders against a (literal) alien menace, as the spies man the ramparts. In Winter Solider, though, the spooks are the foe, as well as the heroes; America (and its security force) is its own worst enemy. Hydra lurks within SHIELD itself, working to promote terrorism in order to make the world ready and eager for totalitarian dictatorship. The terrorist other and the fascist state collude together to oppress and murder us all. End of moral.

It’s not a bad moral, as these things go. It is in fact the case that imperial excess and terrorist extremism thrive on each other; George W. and Osama, loving frenemies, birthed the big ball of hate and bile that consumed thousands of people here and hundreds of thousands overseas. Were we not gallumphing around the Middle East casually starving children and dropping the occasional bomb, who would climb into a plane and kill themselves in a futile orgy of innocent death? If terrorist whackos didn’t create a futile orgy of innocent death, what excuse would we have for picking a random, distant country and turning it into a nightmare wasteland? The pendulum of revenge needs psychopaths pushing on both sides, if it’s going to continue to reap.

Which is sort of what Winter Soldier is about, with its Hydra vs. SHIELD shenanigans…but then, not really. Because Hydra and SHIELD don’t furtively collaborate in bloodshed. Instead, Hydra is both halves of the evil dialectic; it’s both Osama, the terrorist, and George W., the totalitarian twit. Hydra creates chaos to impose imperial order. SHIELD, on the other hand, in the person of the noble Nick Fury (and of course, of Captain America), remains transcendently pure, battling anarchy and fascism in the name of an unexamined, supposedly non-ideological middle. Fury and Cap stand for decency — said decency underwritten by high-tech weaponry, martial bluster, and megaexplosions, of course. At the end Black Widow sneers at the appointed democratic representatives of the people, giving them the old, “You don’t want to know the truth” spiel, utterly without irony. We need kick ass heroes to do the dirty work of protecting us from the evil bastards who tell us they will protect us from the terrorists. America is the land of the violent, uncompromising, brutal middle.

Chris Evans as Captain America seems, then, like the perfect vacuity to paper over this empty aperture. Wooden, certain, noble, sexless, a blank, blond, slightly startled bolus of violence, pointed by the plot in more or less arbitrary directions, scattering bodies and explosions about him as he rolls like a muscle-bound marble about the screen. He is goodness sans ideology, justice sans brains, righteousness sans character. The world in its complexity is shoved into Hydra, which whispers “Hail nuance!” before it is battered into submission by the purity of himbo. America marches on, unsullied by thought, on the straight and narrow path to what we call justice for all.