'Captain America: The Winter Solider': The Gun-Craziest Superhero Movie Ever

"Captain America: The Winter Solider" is classified as a comic-book movie, and it's been described as a political thriller, but is it really an old-fashioned shoot-'em-up?

Spoiler alert: Major plot points and bullet wounds are about to be discussed.

"You have these movies [where] nobody gets shot, and you have this movie, and everybody gets shot," says Thomas Parham, a cinema professor at California's Azusa Pacific University. "They bleed and they go to the hospital."

The movie's casualties include: Chris Evans' star-spangled hero; Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow; Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury; Robert Redford's duplicitous U.S. defense secretary, Alexander Pierce; and, all the way on down the line to Pierce's unsuspecting housekeeper, the late Renata (Branka Katic).

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Guns are not new to Captain America. In the comics, the character has been known to pack heat; the 1940s, in particular, saw a flurry of flying bullets. In the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe, Evans' Captain America, though preferring his shield to a handgun, is surrounded by the fallout from shrapnel. "Captain America: The First Avenger," the 2011 franchise-starter, was set on the battlefields of World War II, and featured 17 different kinds of guns and rifles, per the Internet Movie Firearms Database. (The new movie features 19.)

Guns are also not new to the larger superhero genre, either in print or in film. Batman is a prime example. In some of his earliest comic-book adventures, the caped crusader is a trigger man. By the time the Christopher Nolan movies arrive, Christian Bale's Batman is staunchly anti-gun, but his grim Gotham City is heavily, heavily armed.

What's different about "Winter Soldier" is how many bullets end up in and being fired by major characters.

"No one would question James Bond shooting up the bad guys," says Dave Dorman, a comic artist and illustrator whose portfolio includes Captain America.

And, indeed, when thought of as a 007 movie rather than a comic-book movie (and many critics are thinking of "Winter Soldier" precisely that way), the film makes perfect genre — and gunplay — sense.

"It's pretty organic," Parham says.

The film, with its National Security Agency-era-inspired tale of conspiracy, surveillance and double agents, finds Fury's impenetrable S.H.I.E.L.D. agency having been compromised by the fascists of Marvel Comics' evil HYDRA. For a good chunk of the movie, Captain America's central mission concerns something as pedestrian — and James Bond-ian — as a flash drive.

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"This is really a S.H.I.E.L.D. movie with Captain America in the lead," Parham says.

And while S.H.I.E.L.D. agents — the uncompromised ones, that is — are brave and clever, they're also mortal. Superman may be above engaging General Zod in a firefight, and Captain America's flying friends in "The Avengers" may be able to leave behind everyday woes to battle space aliens, but Fury and his contemporaries have to make do with what they find at the armory — handguns, machine guns, submachine guns, rifles, grenades, grenade launchers, and three helicopter battleships that are at the heart of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s ill-fated Project Insight.

"We have humans fighting humans, so obviously there are firearms involved," Dorman says.

Parham doesn't expect the box-office success of "Winter Soldier" to inspire a superhero arms race. Indeed, the next movie from the Marvel factory, "Guardians of the Galaxy," due out in August, is billed as a space adventure; the upcoming "The Amazing Spider-Man 2," a Marvel movie, but not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, pits superpowers against superpowers.

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"I think this is specific to Captain America," Parham says. "This is a conspiracy thriller."

And as Redford's character in "Three Days of the Condor" could attest, conspiracy thrillers are typically killers.