While you may have seen every Marvel film countless times, you’d be forgiven for missing the Pulp Fiction reference in one of the MCU‘s most beloved sequels.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier was released in 2014, reintroducing the character’s fallen ally Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) as a brainwashed assassin.
The film sees Cap join forces with Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) as well as Falcon (Anthony Mackie) to unveil a conspiracy within SHIELD, which is run by Samuel L Jackson‘s Nick Fury.
At one point, Fury is rushed to hospital after being shot by the Winter Soldier, but he dies in surgery (well, he doesn’t – he fakes his own death to gain the upper hand in his investigation).
When Captain America visits his grave stone, though, a close-up reveals his epitaph: “The path of the righteous man, Ezekiel 25:17.”
Twenty years earlier, Jackson spoke these very words in character as Jules Winnfield in Quentin Tarantino‘s Pulp Fiction.
The scene is one of the film’s most famous, wherein Winnfield and Vincent Vega (John Travolta) gun down two goons after reciting the biblical passage.
The full passage reads as follows:
“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men.
Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children.
And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.
And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”
Jackson once revealed he still knows the full passage, but struggles to remember a single line of dialogue he had in The Winter Soldier.
