My Review: Avengers Assemble

[Mike Holmes]

I'll skip any spoilers that you couldn't get out of watching the trailers.

I've been waiting for this movie since I was seven years old. So a 
little too close to five decades than I might have hoped back then. 
You'd imagine that'd make me generous, but the opposite is closer to the 
truth: I figured if there'd be one movie that Hollywood would find it 
easy to screw up, it was this one. They have form too: the X-men movies 
and the Fantastic Four films.

Leaving aside Doctor Who, where so much of the movie was spent acquiring 
him a hat, a scarf, and an assistant to actually weave in a plot, solo 
superhero movies mostly managed to tell a good story. Spiderman 1 worked 
very well, though the sequels didn't live up to the promise. Daredevil, 
while incorporating some wooden acting, told a story too. X-Men Origins 
of Wolverine managed far better than the ensemble movies to tell a good 
tale.

Ensemble movies on the other hand haven't had a good record. Fantastic 
Four spent too much time setting up the characters and X-men spent too 
much time setting up the better characters, Xavier and Magneto,  who 
unfortunately didn't happen, strictly speaking, to be X-men.

Marvel decided to get around this origins problem by taking the main 
four Avengers and getting their origin stories out in prequel movies. 
They decided that the first Hulk movie was too arty, and rebooted it 
with a different actor. Then the new actor had a spat with Hollywood and 
refused his part in Avengers Assemble - certainly making for a potential 
Strike One.

Iron Man 1 & 2 were much more popular with audiences, probably because 
Robert Downey Junior very much made the part his own. Thor managed a 
partly-amusing fish-out-of-water tale of a demigod stranded on Earth and 
was used to introduce Avengers Bad Guy #1 Loki: Thor's "He's adopted" 
brother. Finally, in deciding to play Captain America as the 
straight-arrow loyal and patriotic soldier, Marvel set themselves up for 
Strike Two.

Fortunately for Marvel the bats connected. Borrowing heavily from Sky 
Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Captain America was handled fairly 
well. Meanwhile Ruffalo has almost stolen the show in making The Hulk 
the best character in Avengers Assemble.

Hiddleston's Loki brings the most malevolence to sibling rivalry since 
Cain and Abel. Mostly new character The Black Widow's entrance is made 
with much aplomb, and the tightest leather pants in any Avenger since 
Emma Peel - though it has to be admitted that Cobie Smulders' Maria Hill 
gives her competition even in those stakes.

Sixth member Hawkeye's character explication is delayed for reasons of 
plot, and afterwards only a few hints are dropped as to his, thankfully 
non-romantic, history with Black Widow. It'll be interesting to see 
whether there's subsequent audience demand  for a backstory movie 
incorporating those two, possibly with Jackson's Nick Fury.

Not that the plot is held up any for introductions, which are very much 
done on the move. Loki has bad intentions, an all-powerful Cosmic Cube, 
and Nick Fury forms The Avengers to stop him.

It goes without saying that, as with the comics, the sundry superheroes 
find it hard to get along. For anyone who wants to know what happens 
when superhero X fights superhero Y, we do discover that it's not very 
good for trees.

Finally the guys assemble at SHIELD's secret base, which owes a tip of 
the hat to Captain Scarlet, and argue some more. If anyone wonders what 
the Buffy guy is doing directing here, then the dialogue shows that 
"Experience in writing witty banter amongst gods, humans, and other 
entities", must have in bold letters on his resume.

Ultimately of course the team has to finally get together and fight the 
bad guys, So there's a little pathos, as they acquire something to 
avenge, and, shades of The Hellmouth opening, Loki fetches an army from 
outer space.

It's at this point that I wanted there to have been a little more prior 
engagement with Loki's army. There hadn't been much time spent 
establishing what they were after on Earth, other than to kill humans, 
or why they stopped off at Transformers Planet on the way. So they just 
get mown down like comsic cannon-fodder in the final scene. But the 
final scene sets a new standard for movie spectacle. It is completely 
absorbing and the superheroes do manage to make all the mowing down seem 
like actual hard work, while the final showdown between one of them and 
Loki produced the loudest joint laugh I've ever heard from a movie 
audience. That is though in a good way that they're going to share with 
their friends, just as soon as their friends have seen the movie - or 
perhaps some are going to ruin what will become a much-replayed movie 
comedy moment.

I wonder how many wives and girfriends have been subjected to revising 
the various prequels in the last couple of weeks. I headed out for a 
repeat IMAX showing last night as a pal's girlfriend (after Thor, 
Captain America and the two Iron Man movies) drew a line in the sand and 
refused to accompany him. I would say though that Whedon has managed to 
make a movie which will appeal far beyond the fanboys and the nostalgic, 
though it's set a new standard for them. It's headed to making the 
studios so much money that they'll be under pressure to get more out 
faster. If this kind of quality is what waiting produces though, I'd 
counsel them to stick to it.

As always, there's an Easter Egg during the trailers. I assume that this 
tells us who the bad guy is in the next movie, but I can't figure out 
who it's meant to be. Answers on a postcard...

FoFP

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