Top Five Badass Scenes: Bucky Barnes (The Avengers)

*Spoilers.*

While Top Five Big Damn Hero Moments posts focus on victories of all stripes, this new periodic feature I’m kicking off will be more specifically geared toward action. I’m looking here at the sort of moments that make me want to shout out loud in the theater. And who better for an inaugural post than Bucky Barnes? Captain America: The Winter Soldier still has some of my favorite MCU fight choreography to this day. This is especially appropriate for the Big Damn Hero Moments/Badass Scenes distinction, since some of these devastatingly badass moments are for a character who’s not yet a hero but a weapon used by others.

 

Attack on the Highway (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)

Oh my god, so incredibly cool. The Winter Soldier is just this inexorable force who never stops coming. He lands on the roof of Sam’s car, smashes the window and yanks Sitwell out, is thrown off and uses his metal arm to slow his momentum, flips back onto the roof of car, and rips the steering wheel out! So intense, so brutal. I love those moments in the midst of the attack when he just goes still—patient, unconcerned, waiting for his moment to strike again. Hands down one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite MCU movies.

 

Fighting Steve and Natasha on the Street (Captain America: The Winter Soldier)

That’s right: this sequence is so epic, I had to split it into two separate entries. While the highway attack gives us that scary-cool relentless brutality, the street fight shows off the Winter Soldier’s skills up close and personal. I love the clang of the Winter Soldier’s metal arm punching the shield, as well as the move where he uses the shield to flip Steve to the ground, taking it for himself, and I live for all the knife-fighting. Also, it’s a little moment amid the larger fight, but I like that quick beat after Natasha uses a device to temporarily disable the electronics in his arm, just that careful curl of the fingers as the arm comes back online and the decisive way he rotates it in its socket before he dives back into the fight.

 

The Apartment Fight (Captain America: Civil War)

A quasi-tag-team with Steve. When Bucky is framed for a terrorist attack and the police come banging down his door, he displays all kinds of cool-as-hell ingenuity to evade them. He uses everything from a mattress to his metal arm to absorb the bullets, and he roughs up the police with cement blocks and their own battering ram. My favorite moments are when he leaps down the middle of the stairwell, grabbing the railing to slow his momentum—it sounds dumb when you describe it, but it looks so cool in action!

Escape from Custody (Captain America: Civil War)

When Zemo reactivates the Winter Soldier, let’s just say the Avengers are lucky that his orders are evidently to escape, not attack. Because at the very least, the Winter Soldier would’ve left some dead CIA folks in his wake. The Winter Soldier is a machine as he methodically fights his way through agents and Avengers, getting past Sam, Steve, Tony, Sharon, Natasha, T’Challa, and (nearly) Steve a second time, with an assist from a helicopter. I especially love his face-offs with Tony and T’Challa, both of whom are somewhat hampered by not having their suits (T’Challa’s still got his enhanced abilities, but the lack of panther claws trips him up at a crucial moment.) I really like how dispassionate the Winter Soldier is throughout the whole thing. No matter what they throw at him, he only has eyes for his objective and simply isn’t going to stop until he fulfills his orders.

Fight with the Flag Smashers (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier: Season 1, Episode 5)

One thing about Bucky is that, by and large, the Winter Soldier’s fighting is undeniably cooler than his own. The Winter Soldier is just devastatingly relentless and lethal, and it’s so effing cool. When Bucky has his own agency, there’s always a level to which he’s holding back, precisely because he doesn’t want to kill people. But at his best, he’s still got the moves. It’s a small moment within a larger fight, where Bucky joins both Sam and Walker in going after the Flag Smashers, but I do love this bit. After kicking a dude through a brick wall (fighting other super soldiers allows Bucky to let loose a little more,) he shows off his lightning-fast reflexes in going hand-to-hand against another guy, catches a knife in mid-air, and then throws it with impeccable precision just inches from the guy’s head after laying him out. 

Relationship Spotlight: Sam Wilson & Bucky Barnes (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier)

Before seeing The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, I was excited for it on the grounds of 1) Marvel, duh, and 2) I love the characters of both Sam and Bucky. The 11^th-hour developments for Sam in Endgame gave me even more reason to look forward to it. However, none of my excitement really stemmed from the fact that it was the two of them together in a series. While there are some amusing bits between them in Civil War, I found the humor there a little forced, and I wasn’t eager for the “buddy cop vibes” I heard other fans crossing their fingers for. The series has some element of that dynamic between them, but it also digs deeper and gets at something that I find much more interesting (some spoilers.)

We need to start with an important establishing fact: Sam and Bucky have never been friends. Not really. When Steve learns about Bucky’s tragic history in The Winter Soldier, of the decades he’s spent being mindwiped and brainwashed in order to turn him into an assassin for his enemies, Sam is sympathetic but of the opinion that Bucky might be too far gone. “I don’t think he’s the kind you save,” he warns Steve. “He’s the kind you stop.” Jumping ahead to Civil War, Sam joins Steve in flouting the new Sokovia Accords and some of their fellow Avengers, first to save Bucky from being killed by police and later to follow Bucky’s lead to a pressing threat. This is where we see the Sam-Bucky slightly-forced comedy duo. Their mild bickering cements the idea that Sam is doing all of this to back up Steve, not because he’s in any way favorably disposed to Bucky.

Throughout the movies, Sam and Bucky’s only major connection is Steve. They’re both his friends, not one another’s, and each reflects a different part of Steve’s life. Steve is all they have in common, and by the time The Falcon and the Winter Soldier comes around, we can add that they’ve both fought Thanos’s army (though it’s not like they were buddies on the battlefield,) but Steve is no longer there. The only connection between them now is the absence of him, and as the question of the shield and Steve’s legacy arises, these two men who’ve never been inclined toward one another find themselves fighting alongside each other to protect that legacy.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s still a good amount of that buddy-cop bickering that a lot of fans wanted to see. For me, some of it remains clunky (like the manufactured “couples therapy” bit) while other jokes land well (like Bucky’s disdain for Sam’s characterization of “The Big 3” and their subsequent banter.) But I find the deeper stuff much more interesting.

At the start of the series, these are two guys who don’t really understand each other, but they think that they do, which is where they get into trouble. Bucky thinks Sam “abandoned” the mantle Steve left him and is thus not the person Steve thought he was, not recognizing how much more fraught the issue of stepping into the role of Captain America is for a Black man. Sam has a tendency to discount Bucky’s extensive trauma, prodding at Bucky’s often self-serious tone with jokes and banter, and it’s not until he sees the way Zemo scratches at Bucky’s old wounds that what Bucky’s been through seems to hit home for him.

The mission they undertake together – a bit fumblingly at first but with increasing cooperation and respect – helps them come to these realizations about one another, and that’s where we see them start to develop a genuine friendship that’s based on more than just the guy who’s no longer there. As they get deeper into the mission, Sam periodically checks in with Bucky to see how he’s coping, especially when Zemo forces him to pretend to be the Winter Soldier again. As someone who’s always appreciated Sam’s background as a guy who led a support group for struggling veterans, that’s the kind of care I wanted to see from him. In turn, Bucky comes to respect and understand Sam’s initial reluctance to take up the shield, and he apologizes on Steve’s behalf for the lack of forethought in having expected it of him without considering the nuance involved. By the end, when Sam and Bucky have a heart-to-heart while training with the shield, the moment feels earned. Something happens between these two over the course of the series, and they end the season in a very different place from where they start.

Sure, Bucky literally getting “invited to the cookout” in the last episode is a little corny (what are you doing showing up with a store-bought cake, Bucky??), but it’s a testament to how far this relationship moves over the course of this series that I can buy Sam extending the invite, as well as Bucky accepting it. And besides, the corniness is worth it for the shot of Bucky casually talking to Sarah while three kids dangle off of his vibranium arm, which is quite possibly the cutest thing the MCU has ever done.

If we’re treated to another season of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, or if Bucky joins Sam in the new Captain America movie, I’ll be eager to watch – not just because of these two characters but because of how they are together.

Relationship Spotlight: Capt. Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes (The Avengers)

Possibly my favorite of Marvel’s numerous incredible friendships, which include the likes of Jessica and Trish from Jessica Jones, Matt and Foggy from Daredevil, and Peggy and Jarvis from Agent Carter (man, the TV shows are just on fire!)  This one is undoubtedly the most intense – it’s not for nothing that they have so many shippers – and it’s one that I come back to time and again (spoilers for all the Captain America movies.)

In the first Captain America, Steve and Bucky’s relationship has a somewhat similar dynamic to Matt and Foggy, in that Bucky starts the film as the “stronger” one, the friend who looks out for the more vulnerable Steve and worries about his well-being but doesn’t patronize him, but that dynamic shifts when Bucky realizes Steve has been made into a superhero (although, in Foggy’s case, Matt is already Daredevil at the start of the series – Foggy just doesn’t know about it yet.)  It kills Steve that Bucky goes off to war without him, both because Steve wants to join up himself and because he knows the danger Bucky will be in.  When the initial results of the supersoldier program aren’t what Steve hoped for, learning that Bucky may have been captured is the push he needs to step up and be the hero he was made to be, dropping his war-bond shilling and mounting an unauthorized rescue operation.  It’s when Bucky is broken out of his Hydra prison that he learns about Steve being Captain America.

What I really love about this is that there’s not even a hint of Bucky being jealous or wrongfooted about this.  Having been used to being the alpha male in the friendship – particularly in the ‘40s – it would have been easy for him to feel displaced and struggle to figure out where he fits now that Steve doesn’t need Bucky looking out for him, but we don’t get that at all.  After a groggy “Were you always this tall?” reaction upon first seeing Steve, Bucky immediately gets behind the new Steve, working alongside him to escape the Hydra facility and leading the cheers for Cap when everyone gets to safety.  When he joins Steve’s Howling Commandos, he makes it clear that he’s following, not the famous Captain America, but “the little guy from Brooklyn,” his lifelong best friend.

No wonder it completely wrecks Cap when he sees what’s become of Bucky in The Winter Soldier.  Here’s his best friend, who most likely would have been dead by now even if he hadn’t seemingly been killed in the war, and he’s been twisted and abused, fashioned into a weapon for the enemy.  Shock, relief, and elation that Bucky is still alive, still in the world, one of Steve’s final tethers to his old life, but visceral horror at how he’s been victimized.  How his mind has been ravaged and he doesn’t even know himself, let alone Steve.  How Steve’s other friends tell him that Bucky is too far gone, and the only option is to put him down before he kills them.

But of course, this is Steve and Bucky we’re talking about here, and Steve’s unconquerable faith in his friend is able to break through Bucky’s programming enough for him to gain a foothold, to painfully start figuring out who he is and what’s happened to him.  Their friendship makes Steve stand beside Bucky when the entire world sees him as a monster and a terrorist, it makes Steve risk everything to keep Bucky safe from those who would kill him for the crimes his hands were forced to commit, and it brings Steve to blows with his other closest friends, all in the name of giving Bucky the chance to be his own person once more.  They don’t make many like these two these days.

Favorite Characters: Bucky Barnes a.k.a. The Winter Soldier (The Avengers)

(Bucky-related spoilers, including Captain America:  Civil War.)  When I first saw Captain America, Bucky was just so-so character, mainly coasting on Sebastian Stan’s performance.  It wasn’t until The Winter Soldier that he came alive for me, both in that film and retroactively in the first movie.  By the time Civil War finally came out, he was one of my favorites.

At first blush, Bucky in Captain America feels like little more than a plot device, Steve’s best friend who becomes a tragic casualty of WWII, and it’s true that he has a lot more going on as a character in the later movies, but there’s still some good value here.  I like that Bucky appears so out of Steve’s “league,” friendship-wise, before the super-soldier serum turns Steve into Cap, but he doesn’t treat Steve that way.  Right from the first, it’s clear that their friendship goes deep.  It’s also important to establish him as a brave all-American boy who likes to have fun, because when he comes back in the later films, we need to see how thoroughly he’s been changed.

‘Cause Bucky has it rough.  Loses his arm and nearly dies after a fall from an elevated train.  Taken by the enemy and experimented on, giving him a bionic arm and powers similar to Cap’s.  Brainwashed and sent on wetwork missions, committing acts that would horrify him in his right mind.  Held in cryogenic stasis between missions to keep him a viable asset for almost 70 years, routinely wiping his mind and subjecting him to further brainwashing.  Because of all this, formidable as he is in The Winter Soldier, he’s always more of a weapon than a villain.  I love the way he fights like an absolute animal when he’s activated, because it demonstrates how much he’s not his own person at that point.  He does insane stuff, even for a powered person, and he just keeps coming relentlessly.  There’s no sense of self-preservation or falling back to regroup, because the fascists who’ve been playing with his brain don’t leave any room for that.

Naturally, the whole thing wrecks Steve, and it’s through his sheer belief in Bucky’s buried humanity that he’s able to break through Bucky’s programming and help him start down the path of returning to himself.  By the time we catch up with Bucky in Civil War, he’s done a lot of work to regain a sense of who he is.  However, now that he’s out from under Hydra’s thumb, some want him to answer for the crimes he committed as the Winter Soldier, as well as other crimes attributed to him.  On the run, fighting those who try to take him in, trying to keep his past from creating any further damage in the world – the prevailing impression I get from Bucky in this film is that he’s just tired.  Running, fighting, being used, over and over, and even as he keeps on going, it’s clear he’s running on empty.  In addition to the physical demands and threats, he’s also dealing with the weight of his past, exacerbated by seeing Steve again.  As much as Steve wants to believe in Bucky and will never give up on him, he’s also wary, untrusting of Bucky, and Bucky more than once has to prove he’s in his right mind before Steve starts to let his guard down.  No judgment on Steve – given what’s been done to Bucky, it would be irresponsible to do otherwise – but it’s still a harsh reminder of what Bucky has been made into.  And even Steve’s unconditional support is hard for Bucky to take, seeing Steve and others endanger themselves for his sake when Bucky doesn’t feel he deserves it.  Despite literally having had his free will taken away in an invasive, torturous manner, Bucky still holds himself accountable for his actions and carries the guilt of them.  Incredible character drama, and I’m loving every second of it, but I hope that, at some point, we can see Bucky getting at least a minute of relatively uncomplicated peace and/or happiness.  He’s long overdue.