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.