Hawkeye Could Destroy S.H.I.E.L.D. On His Own (and almost did)
Hear me out. In the first Avengers film, he was the first one to figure out that the tesseract was able to open a door from both sides of space. He’s freakin’ smart. We have seen him in combat with many of the Avengers and throughout the movies has developed more and more specialized arrows for particular Avengers...just in case. Also, while under mind control by Loki...but still under his own abilities, he did this in the very first movie (with just one specialized arrow):
He then proceeded to only use two more arrows. One to do this:
His abilities are astounding. Yes, Joss Whedon had him keep his hearing for the films (he’s canonically deaf in the comics), and gave him a family (again, in most of the comics he has no family, except for in Millar and Hitch’s 2002 Ultimates #7, where he has a wife and daughter), but he did not exaggerate Clint’s abilities as an archer. Remember, this guy has no super-enhanced strength, no healing factor; although in the comics he is shown to be at peak physical performance for a man and can draw a bow that no one else on earth, without outside assistance, can draw. The heaviest draw is usually a 75 lb draw...he can draw 250 lb. Yeah. Hawkeye can do that
And remember: he only looks not all that great most of the time because the rest of the team is either enhanced physically through experiments (Black Widow, Captain America, Hulk, Scarlet Witch), engineering (Iron Man, Ant Man, War Machine, Falcon), or isn’t human (Thor).
Compared to other normal people, this guy is beyond peak performance. He has fast reflexes, has better endurance, and can see things coming that no one else can. He outsmarted Loki, guys. He knew that Loki was going to see the arrow coming and expected him to catch it:
This is Hawkeye for you: smart, always finding ways to take out as many as he can with one arrow because he knows that he’s limited with what he can do.
He is capable of hand to hand combat, as we’ve seen, but he can’t rely on it in these types of situations when they are going up against enhanced beings and aliens. If this was a fight against normal criminals, he would beat them down fairly easily and no one would even think about messing with him. But he knows he’s human...and thank god he uses his smarts for the good side, because if he went dark?
Here’s what you get when Hawkeye goes dark:
He turns to Ronin. Again, thank god, he’s on our side, right? This is a character with some pretty awesome backstory, and he has all of the abilities and knowledge from working with S.H.I.E.L.D. to easily take that part of it down, if not the Avengers themselves.
