With Guardians of the Galaxy just around the corner and
Avengers: Age of Ultron hype starting to ramp up, I decided to delve into one
of the Avengers animated offerings. Avengers Confidential follows the story of
Punisher and Black Widow as they try to take down a team of villains.
It starts with Punisher and Black Widow butting heads over
custody of a criminal. This, of course, establishes that they are pretty evenly
matched, before Nick Fury shows up. It is quite an effective introduction for
showing the spy-style of Black Widow as opposed to Punisher’s brutal style.
From here, it quickly gets into the story of Punisher and Black Widow teaming
up to take down Leviathan, a bad-guy group who has stolen Shield weapons. Of
course, things don’t quite go as planned.
Avengers Confidential keeps trying to artificially increase
the tension in the story by making the characters take actions that make no
sense. Whether it is a convenient deus-ex brain washing machine or Nick Fury
withholding vital information about the mission, it always feels like it is
trying to shoe-horn in tension. I envision that this movie could have worked as
a buddy-cop type drama, with the contrast between Black Widow’s spy skills and
Punisher’s brutal style as they are trying to be heroes even though they are ordinary people in a world of monsters
and super-soldiers. Instead, we get an endless string of fights between them
which just ends up feeling tiring.
The animation style for the fighting doesn’t help matters.
It definitely feels like they overused the big-sound-and-camera-shake for a
hit, leaving it feeling mundane instead of only for the big hits. Most of the
moves that they depict also end up feeling very unrealistic, which takes away
from any impact that the fights might have. What could have been an interesting
movie on the non-superpowered heroes of the marvel universe just ends up
feeling like a mash-up of styles.
Overall, I feel like Avengers Confidential was a missed
opportunity. It could have been good and starts off promising, but too many
times it feels the need to shove extra tension and action into the movie
instead of letting a story develop. Oh well, at least the proper cinematic marvel franchise is still awesome.
2 out of 5 punishing waffles.
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