You might be familiar with the phrase “less is more,” but are you acquainted with the phrase “more is more”? Buckle your seatbelts, Marvel is ready to demonstrate.
After nearly a decade of grooming all its tights-clad franchises
for the inevitable assemblage — “Avengers assemble!” — Marvel has finally
brought the whole dysfunctional family together for a blockbuster picnic called
The Avengers, a film that is not shy
about its premise: “You liked one superhero, now try six.”
I say six, but I probably should clarify that it’s more like
four-and-a-quarter. Demigod Thor counts as one, as do Iron Man and Hulk, but
poor Captain America
has barely anything to do. At one point he’s asked to pull a lever and he
nearly botches that. Certainly he’s only two-thirds superhero. He can’t fly,
can’t shoot rockets from his forearms, he can’t turn into a rage-monster and
since he’s freezerburned from the 1940s he definitely can’t rock a Twitter feed
(try @drunkhulk, and you’re welcome). Captain America is joined on the
second-string team by Hawkeye, an archery expert and D-list hero, and Black
Widow, a sexy spy who vamps around in clingy fetishwear. Add all of them up and
The Avengers looks like a slightly more
handsome line for the bathrooms at Comic-Con.
The film picks up kinda-sorta-maybe where Thor left off: Thor’s brother Loki has assembled an army on the
other side of the cosmos. All he needs is the Allspark … I mean Tesseract, a
cube of energy last seen in Captain
America, to unlock an extra-dimensional gateway to Earth so he can warp his
alien commandos down into New York City, specifically to the location dictated
on the film permit, which is the Park Avenue Viaduct above 42nd Street. For
such a broad invasion the film certainly uses one location an awful lot; Pershing Square
will be picking dead alien bits out of their cobb salads for weeks.
Once Loki shows up and proves he means business, it’s up to
cyclopean hero-manager Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) — think Tommy Lasorda, but
round, tall, black and less grumpy — to assemble the Avengers from bits of
better movies. Captain America
is in Brooklyn taking his frustration out on
punching bags. Bruce Banner is on the other side of the world avoiding any Hulk
aggression triggers. Iron Man’s Tony Stark is in plain site as he rockets up
and down Manhattan .
Finally, there’s Thor, who only materializes when he senses his brother’s
presence, which made me wonder why he didn’t use that trick to shorten his Thor movie by a solid 30 minutes.
Eventually, after some beleaguered prodding from Fury, the superheroes agree to
form up to fight Loki and his smallpox-infested space-minions.
At this point The Avengers
could have really flexed its muscles and shown us who’s boss. An action scene right
about here would have served that purpose immensely well. Instead the film
settles into a slow, plodding second act that takes all the bad parts of the Fantastic Four movies — fighting in
public, power plays for leadership, whiny temper tantrums — and turns them into
grueling high-concept performance art. When this many fantastically amazing
people are assembled in one room and all they can do is bicker and argue, well
then it’s time to rethink the plot. And hire a nanny.
This goes on for a long time, but eventually it clears the way
for a whopper of a third act that is the big New York City battle. This might be the
mother of all superhero fight sequences, with its smorgasbord of digital
effects, battle tropes and comic clichés, and all the scenery smashing your
insurance provider will let you witness before they raise your premium. And
just when you think a giant flying mechanized tapeworm was the last of it, oh
wait, here’s five giant flying mechanized tapeworms. More heroes, more villains, more explosions, more more more ... In case you’re missing the
theme here, The Avengers is all about
quantity, not quality, though I will admit the last battle sequence is quite stellar for all its incomprehensible grinding.
I did take issue with the post-9/11 doomsday scenarios in this
massive war sequence. If you have some bizarre hankering to watch flying things
crash into skyscrapers or buildings collapsing into their own footprints or
ash-covered New Yorkers pecking through the debris as they fight for their
lives, then boy is this the movie for you. It doesn’t quite exploit 9/11’s
drama, but it does shamelessly plagiarize from that story’s back cover.
The cast may look silly in their little tighties, but they give
decent enough performances. Chris Hemsworth plays Thor like the meathead he is.
Mark Ruffalo is Bruce Banner’s third actor in as many movies, and he does a
fine job conveying Banner’s debilitating duality. Chris Evans is underwhelming
as Captain America , but Captain
America
is an underwhelming hero so it all works out. Robert Downey Jr., as Iron Man,
continues to delight; he steals every scene he’s in. Jeremy Renner and Scarlett
Johannson, as Hawkeye and Black Widow, needed more to work with even though
they were playing peripheral characters. In the end, though, most of the heroes
get their time to shine and fans of each one will find something especially
exciting to latch onto.
The lead actors are charismatic and effective enough, but it all
felt like a rehash to me. I blame the flat characters, who were done growing in
each of their respective movies. For comparison’s sake, look at Batman, a
superhero who is still growing and changing three movies in. These characters
have no lofty ideas about good and evil, and they have no deeper story to
unravel. They simply show up to smash things into bits.
Where The Avengers
really scores points is with its sense of humor. This is a hilarious movie. I
laughed harder in this action picture than I do in most full-fledged comedies. Many
of the gags come from Iron Man, but a surprising number come from the Hulk,
which is odd since the green monster only makes two appearances throughout the
picture.
The Avengers is a
middle-of-the-road comic movie with a boring middle section that’s counteracted
with a terrific, if also overblown, final act. Comic fans will like it, but
that’s not saying much since they have no discernible taste — The Avengers’ mere existence is all they
require.
