Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher Blu-ray Movie Review

Not so Marvelous.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman March 23, 2014

It's not a headline-grabbing, trend-setting, or fan-salivating pairing, but the joining of The Black Widow and The Punisher -- two of Marvel's darkest, most mysterious, most inwardly layered and outwardly skilled characters -- in Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher seems like a recipe for success. Seems. Instead of a detailed character study with pointed action, smart dialogue, and at least some kind of structural novelty, the film feels like a recycled trudge through standard Anime comic book cliché as two heroes who don't exactly see eye-to-eye are forced to team up to prevent a bad bunch of terrorists from spreading illegal weapons around the world. It's really just as dull as it sounds. The action lacks creativity, the story lacks any sort of edge-of-seat complexity and dynamism, and the film doesn't get very much out of its characters. Fans might enjoy the pairing of two icons, but outside of that there's not a whole lot here of note.

I'm bigger than you.

The Punisher (voiced by Brian Bloom) is doing what he does best: taking out the trash. He's violently breaking up a major illegal arms deal and has his sights set on one of the operation's masterminds, Cain (voiced by Kyle Hebert). Unfortunately, he's stepping on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s toes. He gets a mouthful from Director Nick Fury (voiced by John Eric Bentley) and is forced back into the operation alongside Black Widow (voiced by Jennifer Carpenter). They're tasked with taking down a terrorist organization known as "Leviathan" that is not only dealing in illegal arms but also stolen S.H.I.E.L.D. weapons systems. The deeper Punisher and Widow dig, the closer they come to revealing a frightening reality and secrets that go much deeper than either could have expected.

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher efforts to play as a shadowy, dark, dangerous film. The problem is that the plot's particulars don't really allow it to go in that direction, not headfirst, anyway, and not with a whole lot of steam. Sure, bad guys putting a lot of firepower in other bad guys' hands isn't good, and neither is super-secret weapons technology falling into the wrong hands, and neither is some fringe science kind of stuff that could make good guys go bad. Unfortunately, the film seems to just take all of it in a rather casual stride, pumping out action scenes that deal with the problems, advance the story, and build the characters but that ultimately just follow a linear path towards a predictable conclusion. At best, it's like a fresh coat of paint on an old wall. The character pairing is admittedly an interesting one and the clear selling point, yet the failure to really grab the audience, pull it deep into these characters' worlds, and progress them through some sort of life-changing dynamic isn't there. The film's Blu-ray supplements do a better job of communicating who they are and why they're a good pair than does the film, and that's not a good sign.

Even its best is more "blah" than "bravo." Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher features uninspired yet proficient voice acting. The performers seem intent on recreating a particular cadence and vocal presence rather than find a unique delivery to set the film apart from everything else in the modern Marvel universe. The animation is average for the genre, never really exploding into a dazzling array of color or detail but displaying basic shapes well enough and finding the overreaching emotions in facial expressions and movements. The script tries to bring some spice into the mix but most of the between-action character advancement scenes are generically hokey rather than uniquely enthralling. The film is by no means a mess, it's just unoriginal. It's as if all the pieces were plucked from something else and just rebranded to suit this story and these characters. In short, fans have seen it before, or at least seen all that's under the proverbial fresh coat of paint.

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher doesn't really inspire, but it gets the job done. Sony's 1080p presentation flows with the film's stylings, offering a rather steady diet of palatable but hardly filling details. The animation isn't too terribly complex to begin with, leaving the Blu-ray to showcase what amounts to a good bit of even, consistent lines and good image clarity under the high definition microscope. The image takes on a rather flat and drab appearance, which carries over to colors. While the brightest scenes show off some truly vibrant and invigorating colors -- Black Widow's fire-red hair, for instance -- the image on the whole is rather dull and uninspired, with a lot of slightly murky, almost foggy, and nearly monochromatic backgrounds, never mind a plethora of flat-out dark backdrops. The image suffers from a fairly regular attack of unsightly banding. Otherwise, it appears to be technically proficient.

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher features a good, workable DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack. It lags behind similarly presented tracks attached to bigger movies with more detailed and expensively engineered audio mixes, but for the material this track suffices. Opening title music, and most to follow, plays with an aggressive posture, yielding a satisfying level of clarity and surround sound. The low end is hefty and deep, not so natural and potent as it might have been but a good supportive and defining element nonetheless. The track plays around with aggressive sound elements but never pushes them through the listening area with pinpoint placement and vigor. Gunfire punches strongly enough through the stage with a positive, rattling presence. Chapter eight enjoys a room-filling alarm while, on the other end of the spectrum, light ticking clocks fill the stage in chapter 11. The final action sequence springs to life with a good bit of high-energy explosiveness, never rivaling top end tracks but bringing a satisfying sonic crescendo to the proceedings. Dialogue plays evenly and smoothly from the center.

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher contains a few extras. A DVD and a UV digital copy is included in the case.

• Conceptual Art Gallery (HD).
• The Vigilante vs. The Spy (HD, 9:11): A look at the history of the Black Widow and Punisher team-ups in the comics, character qualities and histories, and the intrigue of bringing them together.
• Espionage and Punishment (HD, 10:16): Another piece that more or less covers the same ground as The Vigilante vs. The Spy, but this time through the prism of bringing them into the Anime style. This supplement also looks at the film's world and character designs.
• Previews: Additional Sony titles.

Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As a time killer, fans can do worse than Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher if mindless action, a standard cadence, and an unimaginative visual style aren't too many hurdles to overcome, too many negatives through which to see whatever raw entertainment positives may be left. Fans will likely enjoy the iconic pairing, the inclusion of several lower profile Marvel universe characters, and the end-of-film arrival of a handful of big draw superheroes, but otherwise this one has "standard operating procedure" written all over it. Sony's Blu-ray release of Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher features fair video, decent audio, and a couple of repetitive supplements. Target audiences would be smart to rent before buying.