2 stars (out of four)
This is just one of many spectacles The Avengers offers, including an aircraft carrier soaring into
the sky, a massive metal space worm demolishing Manhattan and the heaving bosom
of Scarlett Johansson. If the idea of seeing Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor and
Captain America sharing the screen excites you beyond belief, then The
Avengers is not just the best movie of the
summer, or even the year; it is the greatest movie ever made.
Earth is once again in trouble and the head of the
top-secret organization S.H.I.E.L.D., Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), at last has
an opportunity to assemble the team of superheroes he has been recruiting over
the course of five movies. There is the tech-savvy playboy Tony Stark a.k.a.
Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.); Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), the scientist who
turns into the not-so-jolly green giant The Hulk when enraged; the
extraterrestrial Norse god Thor (Chris Hemsworth); and Steve Rogers (Chris
Evans), the cryogenically preserved WWII patriot Captain America.
Not that their personalities matter much in this film; the heroes
only appear in diluted form in The Avengers.
After all, with so many exciting things happening here, can you blame the film
for skimping on something as inconsequential as characters? Loki (Tom
Hiddleston), the greasy-haired estranged brother of Thor, has procured a
magical blue cube that he will use to open a portal to a distant corner of the
universe where a few of his alien cronies wait. He plans to enlist their help
to decimate, and presumably take over, our planet.
As you can imagine, The Avengers will need all the help they
can get, so Nick Fury has signed up a few more recruits for the forces of good.
Jeremy Renner plays Hawkeye, an assassin whose marksmanship with a bow and
arrow gives Katniss Everdeen a run for her money. Another invaluable member of
the team is the sultry Russian agent, Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson).
Ms. Johansson, who excels at playing coy and aloof, need not worry here about
her limited range as an actress. As it turns out, her body excels at wearing
leather, and it is this skill that is called upon in The Avengers.
The clash of these titans of comic book lore is presented in several plodding action sequences, including an especially mechanical
one on the aforementioned aircraft carrier-turned-aircraft. Another takes place
on the streets of Manhattan, where product placement conveniently doubles as
the mise en scène of billboards and taxicab ads. Just as Thor did, The Avengers gives itself up to corporate uncreativity; it is
loud, flashy and fleetingly entertaining but ultimately hollow and pointless.
The special effects are absolutely spectacular and utterly soulless.
The film was written and directed by Joss Whedon, who is
considered a demigod in some nerd circles (with all due respect to Thor and his
Asgardian brethren). Those expecting something witty or cheeky, however, such
as Mr. Whedon’s recent horror movie mash-up The Cabin in the Woods, will be disappointed. Any semblance of cleverness
in The Avengers is limited to what
material Mr. Whedon supplies Robert Downey Jr., who struts around in a Black
Sabbath tee shirt, spitting out snarky comments and poking fun at the other
heroes. These spare kidding moments are all but drowned out by the deafening
assault of the film’s pursuit of blockbuster colossality. Even Samuel L.
Jackson’s usual verve feels muted by his busy surroundings.
What a shame, since many of the movie’s jokes are genuinely
funny. The very concept of this movie is totally absurd, so why not embrace
that silliness and allow the humor to carry over into more than a handful of
one-liners?
The movie is also surprisingly boring at times. The first
third, which is bogged down with an excess of incomprehensible exposition, is
particularly dull. We are expected to wait patiently though, because a lot of
cool stuff will surely follow all this tedious jabbering. It must be said
though that Mr. Whedon does handle some of this cool stuff pretty well. When
the camera whizzes around the streets of New York in a computer-animated
frenzy, capturing all our heroes in a single, unbroken shot, it is hard not to
momentarily get caught up in the movie’s love of awesomeness for the sake of
awesomeness.
Joss Whedon does not include anything unexpected in The
Avengers but, to make up for that, he
includes a wealth of things we fully expect, and even demand, to see:
superheroes smashing superheroes, superheroes smashing supervillains,
monologues delivered in monotone, Earth in peril and (spoiler alert!) Earth
saved. To try to do anything else would be to risk the film’s status as the
greatest ever made.
- Steve Avigliano, 5/7/12
