Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher

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.