Captain America: The Winter Soldier make it so profitable, is its emotional bandwidth—all the vivid, nuanced life lived by its characters in between their frenzied escapades," and felt it fixed all the shortcomings of "The First Avenger" "and then some". Conversely, Kenneth Turan of the "Los Angeles Times" said, "["Captain America: The Winter Soldier"] is everything a big budget superhero film should be – except inspired." Manohla Dargis of "The New York Times" said, "Like many others of its type, ["Captain America: The Winter Soldier"] gets off to a kinetic start only to lose steam before blowing everything up." Robbie Collin of "The Daily Telegraph"
Captain America: The Winter Soldier going to seem dirty and underhanded and shifty, and people won't be telling the truth." "Three Days of the Condor" in particular was used as the main source of the script structure, following the idea that the protagonist is being chased by a threat they, along with the audience, only discover halfway through the film. The writers felt this approach was similar to how Stan Lee reinvented Captain America in the 1960s and 1970s, with "the Captain dealing with all sorts of the same things that the country [was] dealing with–Vietnam, Watergate and all that stuff–so he gets to have