Os Vingadores Confidencial: Viúva Negra & Justiceiro

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.

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

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.

Not content on dominating the big screen with a connected Marvel cinematic universe, Marvel now aims to create a connected anime universe. Avengers Confidential is a loose sequel to to Iron Man: Rise of Technovore. This time, Iron Man takes a back seat to previous supporting characters of Punisher and Black Widow. Following their debacle in Karachi, Frank Castle aka The Punisher, has returned to taking out organised crime lords. But when one of his hits crosses path with S.H.I.E.L.D, Frank is taken into custody. He has stumbled onto a vast international conspiracy involving an old Russian supersoldier programme and mind control. Unwillingly teamed up with s.H.I.E.L.D agent Black Widow, Frank has to deal with superpowered foes way out of his league while Widow must confront a shadowy figure from her past.

It is an intriguing story. Well written and feeling like it came straight out of the comic books. No surprise there that it was written by comic book writer Majorie Liu. This is a cool way to tie The Punisher into the greater world of Marvel anime characters, themselves already sharing a lot in common with the live action movie universe. In live action, The Punisher's gritty mafia/street crime stories just do not mix with the Avengers' high flying superheroics. If they cannot do it in live action, anime would have to suffice.

Credit goes to this movie for coming up with an interesting reason why the superpowered Avengers remain out of the picture. Since you have a villain who perfected mind control, the last thing you can risk is your most powerful heroes turning against you. So they get plain ol human Frank Castle, The Punisher, and plain ol human Black Widow. Except, the "plain ol human" bit is conveniently forgotten about 10 minutes in where both Punisher and Black Widow are able to go hand to hand with super soldiers, dodge bullets, punch people through walls and take injuries that would kill any normal human.

Now, this being Japanese anime, Marvel has allowed Madhouse Studios (creators of classics like Ninja Scroll, Trigun and the rest of Marvel's anime output) to sprinkle their own eastern touch into this tale. The result......a mixed bag. First is the screenplay, written by Mitsutaka Hirota of Ramen fighter Miki and YuGiOh Zexal fame/infamy. It is a stiffled screenplay, clichéd and lacking any of the wit or character interplay that marvel's live action universe excels in.

This is not helped by the mediocre voice acting from both Japanese and English actors. Punisher growls and grumbles his way through the movie lacking chemistry with Black Widow; herself portrayed more as a straightforward hero with a tragic past romance than a sultry manipulative secret agent whom no one can guess what she is planning to do next. This same screenplay turns our main antagonist into some love scorned brat with a serious inferiority complex who subjected himself to experiments to become a superpowered stalker after his old flame.

Once again, Marvel anime serves as a showcase of what anime always gets wrong. Hyper detailed artwork is ruined by animation shortcuts. First time Director Kenichi Shimizu who watched one too many Michael bay movies peppers this show with shaky cameras, extreme close ups and long lingering shots focused on Black Widow's shiny leather clad chest and bum areas. Nonetheless, the character designs look straight out of Vampire Hunter D Bloodlust with long curvy sharp featured women, square jawed bulky men and a shadow for every nook cranny and crease on a character. They look beautiful.

So in keeping with the usual Marvel Anime standards, we have another visually stunning little movie with a decent story but little else in terms of the script, characters and animation. Better than Iron Man: Rise of Technovore of course, and much better than that CGI atrocity Iron Man/Hulk: Heroes United. Yet no where near DC and Warner Premiere's most mediocre efforts.

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.