Iron Man & Captain America: Heroes United (2014)

Without doubt, Marvel is atop of the entire entertainment world now. Their trailblazing critical and commercial success with the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe, the surprisingly high quality of their breakthrough television and Netflix franchises and continued popularity amongst comic-book fans the world over have made them a force to be reckoned with. They can seemingly do no wrong anymore.Well, unless you count their cartoons and direct-to-video releases, that is.Yes, sadly for the most part, Marvel seems to really drop the ball when it comes to cartoon adaptations of their work. With the notable exception of the 90's "X-Men" cartoon series, many- if not most- of Marvel's animated television and video releases have been sub-par at best. And the "Heroes United" franchise- including this film "Iron Man and Captain America", is certainly no different. It's a clear and cynical cash-grab made to trade in on the success of the (much better) big-screen MCU releases with minimal effort given and minimal talent on display. Cold and calculated films that were designed to make a few bucks off of parents looking to buy their young children something Marvel-related. To start, the quality of the writing is exceedingly poor, and the film suffers from haphazard structure, lack of motivation and cringe- worthy dialog. The plot is about as simple as they come- Captain America and Iron Man team up to battle the Red Skull. It's simple, classic, to-the-point superhero material. How can you screw that up? Very badly, evidently. Every single line of dialog is either a clichéd piece of not-so-witty banter, an on-the-nose exposition dump or a confusing and brainless non-sequitur. Characters are completely flat and represent only the most basic of hero and villain archetypes. And the general flow and narrative structure is patchy and flimsy, somehow achieving a contradictory feeling of both being boring and bizarrely jarring at the same time.The animation is shockingly poor in terms of quality, and it's just criminal that such a major studio gave this the go-ahead for release. Character models are strangely over-stylized and under- detailed, and are rendered at such a level of quality that they very much look like they were pulled out of a late-90's video-game. The actual animation is incredibly basic and lacks variety, giving every character a strangely robotic movement that creates a certain "distance" between the viewer and the film... you just can't get invested in something that looks so lifeless. And the lip- synching... my god. Character faces move in a eerie and unsettling-looking juttered-frame manner that makes the image hard to look at at. It's like they accidentally deleted every-other from the facial animations and just doubled-up on what was left. Just weird.Add to that tacky voice-over work that sounds like its bordering on self-parody, childish humor that wouldn't make a 12-year-old giggle, contrived references to the live-action movies despite this taking part in its own "universe" and a laundry-list of other faults and problems, and you just get a bad animated movie all around.Trust me... even if you're genuinely interested, just do yourself a favor and stick with the live action Marvel movies. They're great! But this? A complete disaster! I'm giving it a 3 out of 10. Maybe young children will get a kick out of it... but even then, I kinda doubt it.

Okay, stop me if you've heard this...Have you ever watched a movie or a sequel (seeing how this acts like one) and felt it was just doing the same thing the first was doing?Certainly felt that right there.The plot is a bit different from the Hulk one but unfortunately all the same problems you hated about the Iron Man & Hulk film are still here...And they turned up the badness volume to 8000.Of course you know what that means...The childish dialogue no sane hero would ever say is still here... except it's somehow even more childish and cringy to listen to. Well done writers.The humour that wasn't funny in the Hulk film is still here... And if this doesn't ring a bell, I don't know what will but it still isn't funny.The rather monotone voice work is still here.... except it's more monotone than ever before and when you even have Clancy Brown in your cast, that is not a good thing.The painfully bad and lifeless animation is still here.... except it looks more lifeless with everyone moving more jerkily than ever before and some really REALLY bad fight choreography. You'll swear it looks like they're trying a spot of ballerina dancing instead.Basically, I could have just copied and pasted everything I said about the Hulk film and the whole review would be almost identical. Because that's what this miserable piece of crap is, identical. Identical in how poor the animation is, identical that no one in the cast seems to be giving it his or her all and identical in that you shouldn't even be thinking about plunking your money on something like this."Groundbreaking CG Animation!" I've seen more ground-breaking animation on an old Atari 2600 game, and that is truly saying something.

Unlike the other reviewers, I do not care one way or the other what the graphics are like. Frankly, I don't find computer graphics to be that impressive. I am much more impressed by the old fashioned way of animating, where they draw it by hand and have to redraw each piece in just a slightly different position to make it look like things are moving. However, whether it is done via a computer or by hand, I do not really care. What matters to me is if there is a good story and if I am entertained.I thought that the story was actually pretty good. I liked how Red Skull was able to take the Captain's powers and the way he did it. I also liked that he was, at least at first, able to convert him to Hydra. This made for an exciting story line. I wondered how Captain America and Iron Man were going to be able to defeat Red Skull. I was also wondering how they were going to get Captain America to not be following Hydra any longer. I felt they did a good job with that. There were a couple of moments near the end when the Hulk showed up and was fighting that I found stretched believability.The thing that I liked the least about the movie was that they didn't use the actors that play the characters in the live action movies for the voices in this one. I think that would have made it a whole lot better.But, overall, I was entertained and I liked the story line. I would recommend this movie.

I have a theory. Marvel is SO successful on the silver screen, that they've decided to throw whatever is leftover on DVD, not really giving two craps if it's any good or not. While DC pours all their love into their DVD's, Marvel just give us mediocre nonsense like Iron Man.... I'm not writing that long ass title again.So what's wrong with it? Short answer. EVERYTHING. Like Black Widow & Punisher Heroes United (damn! wtf is with these titles?!) IMCAHU also has horrible animation (see example below), boring voice casting and a story NOBODY cares about (Red Skull is the bad guy, Hail Hydra, you get the idea).My biggest issue with this movie was the animation. Not even good enough to be on Saturday morning cartoons. IMHO, this kind of animation weakens a story, because it's stiff and affects the pacing badly. Action seems stilted and slowed compared to what's suppose to be going on.There's not much else to say other than if you miss this, you aren't missing much. Only watch if you're some kinda die hard Marvel fan. Otherwise, stick to DC for the straight to DVD movies based on comics. Trust me, they might be stumbling on their big screen adaptations but they are consistently hitting home-runs on our flat screens.