Today’s quick review: Iron Man & Captain America: Heroes United. During a training session, Iron Man (Adrian Pasdar) and Captain America (Roger Craig Smith) are attacked by Taskmaster (Clancy Brown), a mercenary with a talent for mimicry. The mercenary has been hired by the Red Skull (Liam O’Brien) to take down Captain America and steal Iron Man’s technology for use in a secret weapon by the evil organization Hydra.
Iron Man & Captain America: Heroes United is a CGI-animated superhero movie based on the Marvel characters. Iron Man & Captain America is a kid-friendly movie with a bare-bones plot, simple conflicts, and nearly constant action. Low production values and a restrictive target demographic keep it from amounting to much, but the film does offer very modest entertainment for those looking for the equivalent of a Saturday morning cartoon.
Iron Man & Captain America is the second Heroes United movie, and it makes improvements on its predecessor, Iron Man & Hulk. Iron Man’s reduced dialogue and the absence of Hulk keep the number of cringe-inducing jokes down to a manageable level. Taskmaster shows potential as a villain, unlike the previous film’s generic and forgettable Zzzax, and his fight with Captain America is the best of the movie.
However, Iron Man & Captain America shares many of the same core weaknesses as Iron Man & Hulk. The animation is stiff and stilted, the character models are low-resolution, and the backgrounds are devoid of life. Thanks to the low animation quality, the action has little impact, although several of the fights do manage to be entertaining. The voice acting is passable but nothing more. These and other weaknesses drag the movie down.
Iron Man & Captain America: Heroes United is a step up from its predecessor, but it still has a ways to go to be a truly enjoyable film. Fans of the superhero genre may appreciate a few of its references, but there’s not enough that’s clever or exciting about the movie to make it worthwhile. Instead, fans of the genre should check out Ultimate Avengers, Justice League: War, or one of the other animated offerings from Marvel or DC.
5.7 out of 10 on IMDB. I give it a 5.0 for kid-oriented superhero action that’s missing most of its spark.