Avengers Confidential: La Vedova Nera & Punisher

For having so much potential the writing or story telling is simply abysmal. The dialogue is some of the worst I've heard, well... period. The voice acting is solid and the animation isn't bad. Like I said, lot's of potential. So much excellent source material to work with. I have no idea how anyone can write dialogue this terrible.

Did not like it.

It was more talk than action. I kind of hate it when animation is all talk, what's the point? The animation does not even look cheap it looks like some effort went into it. Enough effort for it not to be just the characters talking for 90mins.

Maybe it would be worth the talk if it was not a story I heard many times. Though the addiction of the Punisher is some-what refreshing, listening to the Black widow and Nick fury defend their occupations as spies is only interesting when Sam L Jackson and Scarlett Johansson do it.

The voice acting was not worthy of all that talk. It was like they were just reading their lines and not really well.

I've seen better action sequences and the character design was weak. When The Avengers finally made it on screen, I was not excited to see them at all.

I do like seeing the villain Graviton done for animation but his appearance was to minimal too salvage the film.

Found it uninteresting.

I was curious to see how Marvel would do a team up with Black Widow and Punisher, and especially curious to see how treat the Punisher. The movie starts off strong with Punisher doing what he does best: putting criminals in the ground with no remorse or mercy. The PG-13 definitely helps letting Frank Castle be his dual violent self, even if they don't show everything. However the movie fizzled out after this. The idea of having Shield forced to rely on normal humans like Widow and Punisher because the villains and have mind control device so if they got brainwashed, they'd cause untold damage was a good reason not to send in the full Avengers. The villain's rational and plans, the twist of who ultimately is behind everything, and the heroes way of overcoming this complication all feel like something straight from a Marvel team up/cross over comic line (preDisney anyway).

However the movie seems to forget this rule almost as soon as they introduce it as we then see both Punisher and Widow take on literal armored super soldiers with just their bare hands, defeating them with a single punch. So much for being "normal humans". There are also some big time plotholes that happen near the end when Black Widow plays her trump card to get the upper hand against all the super soldiers (I won't spoil it but the timing is just way too convenient). The dialogue at times is also just down right corny, painfully so. Idk if it's bad translations from Japanese to English or if somebody really thought these lines were deep, but man did it stink.

If it wasn't for the dialogue and some other faults, I'd give this a 6-6.5 out of 10, but no I'm giving it a 5 and even that may be a little generous.

Didn't really love this movie! But it was somehow interesting!

Recently added to Disney Plus, so now showing up near the top of my alphabetical trawl the films there, was this 2014 Anime film, that has decent action scenes, but very little else going for it.

Having initially worked against each other, and ruined a SHIELD operation, Frank Castle (Brian Bloom) is convinced to team up with Black Widow (Jennifer Carpenter) to locate a black-market weapons dealer named Caine (Kyle Herbert). They track him to the base of LEVIATHAN, a terrorist organisation and there come up against Elihas Starr (Grant George) a former SHIELD Agent, and lover of Widow, who was presumed dead.

I really struggled to maintain much interest in this. It's not without any merit, visually it's pretty good. It was the last thing produced with Madhouse Animation studios and their style is fun and dynamic. The story of this one is . . . Fine. Former agent assumed dead and now a villain is . . well, the Winter Soldier, I guess, but it's rehashed again here with the added twist that he was Black Widows lover at the time he was 'killed'. It actually does the thing that, realistically all Marvel movies should do, and calls in the rest of the heroes at the end to make sure that they don't fail. The story does have a reasonably sensible reason for keeping them out of it earlier though, which is a nice touch.

The vocal performances are really poor though. There are notable actors involved, such as Jennifer Carpenter, but there's a disconnect between the speech and the visuals (perhaps because it was designed around a Japanese performer?). There's also a lifelessness in the sound design, with no background noise in a lot of the scenes and the editing leaves a lot to be desired.

Because I'm watching everything on Disney Plus (or at least trying to) I'm sure I'll get around to the other collaborations with Madhouse, but I hope they're a little better finished than this one is.