The Avengers / Marvel’s Avengers Assemble

Happily, this is the only thing Joss Whedon has done that I've really enjoyed. Well, except for that one episode of Firefly where Jayne is seen as done sort of God. Despite an unnecessarily slow first two acts, the payoff was well with it, and though it was really the bare minimum I'd expect from an Avengers feature,

The key is probably that Whedon only directed rather than writing the full script – he tweaked, but he didn’t come up with the concept or the larger part of the dialogue. So we don’t have to put up with his trademark smugness, largely consisting of him using genre tropes and then sneering at them or nudge-nudge-wink-wink laughing at them as if beneath him – and calling it irony. Instead we get his genuinely funny glib one-liners deflating action scenes in just the right way, and a respectful treatment of a property he clearly loves. 

The story is basic, which is necessary for the complex task of bringing so many characters who already have full-movie backstories together. The Avengers featured in the film are showcased – Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Hawkeye and Black Widow. We also see the antagonist, and his simplistic comic book plan – Thor’s brother Loki means to use the Tesseract to bring a huge army of aliens to Earth and conquer all, the idea being that they will then crown him. So Nick Fury has to get all the prickly superheroes together in one place – gathering them and having them all learn to cooperate forms the bulk of the fairly dull first two thirds of the film. Then Loki fools the lot of them, puts them in disarray and takes the tesseract. From then on, things get fun – the Avengers work together to stop a full-blown alien invasion, including fun flying dragon-eel-turtle things on a massive scale. Iron Man has a moment to prove his mettle – do ho ho! – and then we get a typical teaser for the next film.

Much to my surprise, given that he’s my least favourite member of the team most of the time, and despite the fact it’s inadequately explained why he decides the rest are his allies, the real star emerges as The Hulk. I had never seen the guy they cast as Banner before but he was perfect, much more so than I imagine Ed Norton would have been, and ultimately, having him onscreen with Thor allows for Whedon’s humour to shine through, as an Asgardian god is one of the few characters you can believably have engaged in slapstick scenes with The Hulk without being reduced to a red smear on the ground. And his scene very close to the end was one of the best in cinema history, no doubt about it.

Thin on plot and slow to start with, it was nonetheless what an Avengers film should have been. The personalities were well-balanced, with straight-laced Cap and swaggering Stark sparking off one another brilliantly without getting to dominate, the Black Widow far from a peripheral extra, each character being admirably human – and SHIELD giving the kiddies the lesson that they ought to question authority figures at all times, it may not have blown away my expectations, but it certain exceeded them.