After the abysmal Iron Man and Hulk: Heroes United and the spectacularly bland Iron Man: Rise of the Technovore, my faith in Avengers Confidential: Black Widow and Punisher was quite low. However, I was delighted to find that the latest Marvel animated adventure was a well-crafted character study of its title characters that delivers some spectacular action to boot.

The directorial debut of Kenichi Shimizu (who worked on Rise of the Technovore as an animator), Avengers Confidential finds Frank Castle caught up in a SHIELD investigation, forced to work with Black Widow to take down their mutual target: a terrorist organization called Leviathan that’s selling super weapons to the highest bidder.Right off the bat, it’s clear the movie isn’t pulling punches when it comes to violence. Any concern that this will be a dumbed down Punisher is out the window when the first thing he does is cut somebody’s throat – and it only gets more hardcore from there. Of course, the film maintains its PG-13 rating with clever editing that cuts around the graphic violence without lessening its impact. True to the finest Punisher tales, it’s what you don’t see of Frank’s methods that makes him all the more imposing.The action is frequent and fun, but it rarely comes at the expense of the story or character development as is the trap so many of these animated features fall into. The only instance of this comes near the end when the Avengers gang shows up inexplicably, seemingly only for the sake of showing face. While it’s a delight to see the new Captain Marvel in animated form (though she never speaks), it’s superfluous at best. One of the few other complaints that can be lobbed against the movie is its occasionally stiff voice performances, primarily courtesy of Jennifer Carpenter’s Black Widow and Grant George’s Elihas Starr. Brian Bloom’s Frank Castle, however, is delightfully bleak.Those hiccups aside, Black Widow and Punisher both get adequate exploration and even develop an unexpected bond. Widow gets a brunt of the development, with the movie diving into her history with a former SHIELD scientist-turned-Leviathan-super-soldier (the aforementioned Elihas Starr), which adds some emotional context to the mission at hand and gives this supporting character a surprisingly heartfelt arc of redemption. While the plot overall is pretty generic, adding this dimension to it makes it far more engaging.For his part, Frank Castle’s characterization is, fittingly, less revealing, but he gets his moments in the spotlight nonetheless. Depicted as hardened as we’ve come to expect, the movie takes a different approach to peeling back the layers on Frank. For example, he shares a brief moment with a guard in a SHIELD facility when he recognizes a fellow marine and shows him his “Semper Fi” tattoo. Later, this small moment pays off when the mission goes awry and Frank is left holding some guilt as a result. It’s a simple and effective way to offer some depth to a character that is too often played as a one-note badass.The movie is also laced with some levity courtesy of Amadeus Cho and his dog. It’s an odd fit at first, considering the grim nature of Castle’s quest for extreme punishment and the world of espionage that Widow lives in. But the script by Mitsutaka Hirota (from a story by comic book scribe Marjorie Liu) works it in organically, playing up Cho’s crush on Black Widow – not to mention the dog’s apparent crush on Frank Castle.Again, these are subtle character dynamics that wind up adding a lot to the overall picture once things go wrong. Despite its great action, Avengers Confidential is far more understated than most of Marvel’s animated flicks, giving the project a maturity and respect for its audience that we haven’t seen in a while.