Sweetness guaranteed in hipster comedy

In 1997, the editor of Backwoods Home Magazine asked friend John Silveira to write some joke ads that would fill the classified section when it ran short. One was a phony personal ad, and the other was this little gem:

WANTED: Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.

Years after the fake ad ran, the magazine was still getting curious responses about time travel companions — some were jokes and others quite real. The ad eventually became an early internet meme and has lived on in cyberspace ever since. Now the “this is not a joke” joke ad forms the basis of Safety Not Guaranteed, a spectacularly charming romance about a man who runs the ad in a Seattle alternative magazine and then falls in love with the intern reporter sent to investigate his apparent lunacy.

Here the ad’s writer is Kenneth (actor-director Mark Duplass) and he is certainly somewhat crazy, if not completely unhinged from society. He sports a severely unfortunate mullet and faded jean jacket, like he really is a time traveler … from 1984. His strained bravado and all-around macho behavior, along with his lovable oafishness, suggests he might be a cross between Dwight Schrute and Napoleon Dynamite. If neither of those names rings a bell, then maybe Safety Not Guaranteed is the wrong film for you.

The intern reporter is Darius (Aubrey Plaza), and she finds the assignment beneath her. She’s tagging along with Jeff (Jake M. Johnson), the article’s real reporter, and another intern, Arnau (Karan Soni), a frail Indian boy who seems to be experiencing the real world for the very first time. They’re all quite sure that the person who wrote the ad is insane, but then they meet Kenneth, who confirms their suspicions. Darius, though, sees through some of Kenneth’s oddball eccentricities and she catches a glimpse of a wounded soul, which she immediately identifies with. They connect further as het vets her candidacy as a time travel companion in scenes involving gun ranges, exercise routines, combat training and mission debriefing.

Romantic chemistry goes very far in films like this. These two leads have it. They work mostly because they’re both so strange. Duplass has this mushy face and kind eyes, and he makes Kenneth a genuine creature with complex fears of being alone and unwanted. Plaza — who, as April Ludgate, is easily one-third of the comedy on NBC’s Parks and Recreation — appears younger and more attractive than Duplass, but she makes Darius work by being plucky and resilient, and she never succumbs to the clichés of the rom-com drama.

Safety Not Guaranteed has another sub-plot involving Jeff, the lazy reporter who took the assignment because it brought him near his first girlfriend as he veers dangerously close to an early mid-life crisis. As Darius falls deeper into Kenneth’s time travel plans, Jeff does his own time traveling back to his high school days. It’s a fun narrative device that reaps its own rewards separate from the main plot. It also suggests that director Colin Trevorrow and writer Derek Connolly are making a grander statement about time and how it plays with our expectations of the present.

I’ve told you the plot, but I’ve been vague on many of its details. That is intentional. Safety Not Guaranteed has an interesting payoff that I wouldn’t dare spoil. I will ask this, though: how far would you go to discover Kenneth’s sanity? I bet it’s not as far as Darius.

Time will tell.

Let's go camping in Moonrise Kingdom

When I was younger I was in the Boy Scouts. I didn’t much care for it at the time, but I look back on those years fondly.

The camping memories are especially vivid: the boy who played Dungeons & Dragons in his tent because his parents forbid it in their home. The boys who would take fallen branches and broken sticks and pretend they were guns and bazookas; pinecones were grenades. The one boy who always had a cast somewhere on his body. The kid who wasn’t happy unless he was burning something with a lighter (once he tried to light a Porta-John on fire). The kid who plucked soggy Vienna sausages from a can and stuck them up his nose. The boy who tried to light his farts at every campfire. The one boy who would never shower (think Pig-Pen from Peanuts). The one kid who dropped his flashlight in the portable toilet, which meant we all had to look at vaguely luminescent feces in the bathroom until the batteries died several days later. Or the one boy who would arrive at week-long snow outings without a jacket or even spare socks.

We did scouting things, like merit badges and knots and wilderness survival, but those memories are crowded out by the others, the ones of the people and their wild personalities.

I thought about those scouts a lot during Moonrise Kingdom, Wes Anderson’s adorable new love story set within a troop of mischievous Khaki Scouts on a 16-mile-wide island in Rhode Island. The movie is a love poem to rambunctious boys and their medieval ideas about life, adventure and girls. It stars two young actors who convey the awkward innocence of adolescence because, well, just look at them, they’re perfect.

First there’s Sam (Jared Gilman), the unpopular Khaki Scout with the coonskin hat who hatches an escape plan as thorough as the one in The Shawshank Redemption, though we never see it, just the poster covering the torn hole in his pup tent. Before he leaves, he drafts a letter of resignation to Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), a kind and compassionate scout leader with a laughable smoking habit. With his backpack stocked with rope, navigation equipment and enough Tang and beef jerky to last a week, Sam cuts a trail across New Penzance Island to discover himself.

He eventually meets up with Suzy (Kara Hayward), who receives little attention in her home so she decides to run away with Sam, maybe to a hidden cove where there will live off the land and fall in love. Suzy is more complex to Sam’s textbook simplicity. They make a darling couple, though some of the things they do and encounter require maturity beyond their years and they perform admirably. Once these two go missing, the small island is turned upside down by pocketknife-toting Khaki Scouts, their overwhelmed leader, a mail plane, two marginally worried parents (Billy Murray and Frances McDormand) and a befuddled police officer (Bruce Willis). Every now and again, Bob Balaban turns up in his sailing gear to narrate parts of the adventure.

Now, I’ve just told you the plot, but I’ve expressed less than a tenth of what Moonrise Kingdom actually is. Keep in mind, this is a Wes Anderson picture, which means the movie is filled with whimsy, quirkiness and all his other signature moves: deadpan acting, a retro lo-fi soundtrack, wonderfully detailed sets, unique cinematography techniques (unconventional framing, symmetrical composition), Bill Murray’s feigned machoness, and a timeless, albeit analog, fashion sense. New to the Anderson collection this time around is an authentic love story. Love was an expression in his other films, including Rushmore and Bottle Rocket, but this might be Anderson’s first full-fledged romance.

I was startled to see where Sam and Suzy’s relationship went, especially since they appeared to be no older than about 12 years old. Surely, sex is too mature a theme for that age, but the movie handles it with care and I think the PG-13 rating is proof to that. Any other movie would hint that this adolescent love couldn’t last, that Suzy and Sam would grow up and drift apart and then rediscover love with other people in high school or their 20s. I think not. I can picture these two growing old together. It’s a fantasy relationship, but remember this is a fantasy world.

The two leads have their romance, but then there’s another — our love affair with that damn island. It’s just so delightfully odd, with its patches of scruffy beauty pock-marked by colorful locals and those wild Khaki Scouts and their 60-foot treehouse and their impenetrable scout camp. Anderson has a way of coloring his locations with so much character that they develop into personalities themselves. Think of that school in Rushmore, the Tenenbaum manor, the Indian train in The Darjeeling Limited, or, my favorite, the research vessel Belafonte in A Life Aquatic. Like those settings, New Penzance Island is special because it’s magical, yet feels real enough to inhabit these characters. If you leave the movie and don’t have the urge to vacation to that island then Moonrise has failed you.

The movie is also hilarious, but in subtle swaths of visual and ironic humor. I especially loved the dialogue, which is so underplayed it almost feels off the beat. There’s nothing funnier than Bill Murray’s character, unhappy with the days events, coming downstairs shirtless in his pajama bottoms carrying a bottle of whiskey and an ax and telling his remaining children, “I’ll be out back. I’m going to find a tree to chop down.” Even the children are given funny lines, like when someone asks whether a dead dog was a good pet or not. Sam says, “Who’s to say?” What child speaks in abstract philosophical nonsense? Anderson’s children, that’s who.

Elements of fantasy creep into the picture more and more as it goes along, and at one point someone is struck by lightning with no discernible injuries. There’s also a flood that sweeps away a scout camp, a totem pole that nearly crushes a celebrity cameo, a Noah’s Ark of costumed children and a storm of the century. Anderson shows us these events using subtle special effects, miniatures, trick lighting techniques, forced perspective and almost always at right angles perpendicular to the action. The film is like nothing you’ve ever seen … unless you’ve seen a Wes Anderson movie before.

I loved Moonrise Kingdom, and not just because of the scouting material. I loved it because it made me appreciate my childhood so much more. Those awkward phases defined who we are today, more so than high school, or college, or a career. Those moments when we were discovering ourselves, those were the key moments of our development. Moonrise captures that and does so with careful affection.

I'm including all the pictures after the jump, but one note: they had a yellow tint to them that I don't remember in the movie. Using Photoshop I've balanced the colors a little better. It's not my intention to change Anderson's movie; I just felt like they didn't match what I'd seen on the screen.

Prometheus ponders death ... and life

Prometheus, the long-awaited quasi-canon Alien prequel, does not answer the questions Alien fans have been asking since 1979, nor does it acknowledge the fact that they've been asked at all. It does, however, veer off on its own to ponder grander bits of the cosmos. Like Ferdinand the Bull, why should Prometheus gore spectators when it can be smelling the flowers?

For those interested in those sorts of scenes: fear not, there is gore, enough to make you re-appreciate John Hurt’s post-coma snack from Alien, but these scenes are framed within a larger idea, one that hints at the very origins of life on this planet and others.

What’s especially refreshing about Prometheus is the way it fuses laboratory and chapel together in this theo-scientific mash-up of chest-bursting hyphenation. The main character, daughter of a Christian missionary, is searching for a creator, or maybe the Creator. When she finds a humanoid alien species on a foreign planet, a colleague suggests that her God doesn’t exist after all. “But then who created them?” she asks pointing at the alien discovery. Religion is so often posed against science, and science against religion, but those formulas neglect to include the people who can’t answer to one without the other. Surely before the Big Bang there was a Bigger Bang, right?

These broader questions are surprising here, especially coming from Alien, a straightforward sci-fi horror-thriller, about an acid-blooded creature turned loose on a killing spree within the claustrophobic steam-blown halls of a space freighter. There was a great deal of subtext in that film — gender roles, rape fear, technology — but for the most part it was a monster movie, maybe the ultimate monster movie. Prometheus aspires to be something entirely different, and achieves that.

The movie takes place roughly 50 years before Alien. Research vessel Prometheus has landed on a rocky world outside of our solar system. Its crew, geeky scientists and craggy terraformers, have been guided here by star maps found within ruins on Earth. On the uncharted planet they discover an ancient civilization of alien humanoids — they’re “alien,” as in foreign, not “alien” as in the xenomorphs from the previous movie — and what appears to be a science lab where they were engineering life, or maybe death.

Leading the research team is Dr. Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace), though she holds little power compared to Prometheus captain Janek (Idris Elba) or icy Weyland Corporation honcho Vickers (Charlize Theron). Vickers is so cold and impassive her crew thinks she might be an artificial intelligence in a human construct, like robot crewmember David (Michael Fassbender), who has modeled his mannerisms from Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.

Horror oozes into the seams of the rather straightforward sci-fi movie after Shaw and her team discover the Engineers’ elaborate storage chambers, filled with stone jars containing some kind of creature, virus or biological technology. As they venture deeper into the ruins, they find fresh horrors: fossilized humanoid bodies, morphing wall murals and Alien’s famous “space jockey” riding his macabre gun-throne. How all this does or does not fit into the Alien legacy is something I will let you discover, but I’m not entirely sure the movie will have all the answers. It’s ambitiously ambiguous to the point of hair-pulling frustration.

Oh, and the plot holes. There are many. Too many for a movie this rich in detail, wonder and scope. For instance, why does a crewmember attack his teammates? Why does a whirling probe device bing back results after parking itself outside a suspicious door? Why did the Engineers carve xenomorphs into their wall art? Why did the humanoids all die, except for one in a hibernation pod? Why did the contents of the stone jars have three different effects on three different characters? And the most asinine plot hole: how could two characters get lost in a labyrinthine temple when they had a 3D map of the temple itself? I was disappointed that many of these details weren’t clarified. It’s as if Prometheus was trying to juggle too many elements and there was a banana peel on the stage.

All that aside, though, Prometheus has good bones and I think most viewers will do what I did and forgive the reckless story elements that mar the otherwise solid plot. After all, the film looks wonderful, including shots of Prometheus hovering down onto a world with an entire other planet filling the skies above it. The set design is top-notch, with lots of neat space technology and ship designs that are juxtaposed against new H.R. Giger-designed sets made of sinew and spines. And the actors are wonderful, especially Rapace and Fassbender. She plays with too much emotion and he plays with none at all, and the balance is perfect.

It is directed by futurist visioneer Ridley Scott, whose Alien and Blade Runner are sci-fi royalty. In Prometheus Scott romanticizes space and exploration, though tints of Alien’s blue-collar grittiness are not far off — remember, this is a prequel of sorts. His work here also makes me think of westerns, which has never been a stretch for science fiction. Both genres thrive off that great void outside the window. In westerns the void is the desert, but here it’s space, the ultimate abyss, where a man, woman or entire civilization can find its soul and lose it again without bumping into anything.

There’s an inherent loneliness to films like this, which further validates the importance of the Shaw character: her ultimate science-and-religion quest is to discover if humans are alone in the universe or if a higher power is at work here, which is she so willfully dons a spacesuit to dance at the mouth of madness. For her, the loneliness will end with a larger discovery.

Audiences will go to Prometheus hoping to find aliens. Like Dr. Shaw, they will discover so much more. 

You sank my Battleship!

In the pantheon of bad directors, the throne room of Michael Bay has found its court jester. His name is Peter Berg.

The honor couldn’t come to a more pompous jerk. Not long ago I saw a behind-the-scenes feature with Berg, who directs with a ferocious energy as he charges his way around the set, swearing loudly to himself and carpetbombing every shot with camera coverage so his editor can make the film for him. He struck me as a man who doesn’t really like movies, but looks upon them as things to be conquered, like Genghis Khan looking down at empty spaces on maps saying, “Mine.”

Berg is no stranger to bombastic skull-grinding action films: his past movies include the inexplicably dopey The Rundown, the blasé-blasé superhero romp Hancock, and The Kingdom, the war-thriller that’s notable to Valley residents because a man died on a Mesa freeway during its production. (He also made the movie version of Friday Night Lights, which was loud and kinetic, but also quite wonderful and heartbreaking.) Berg’s latest is a live-action version of the Milton Bradley tabletop game Battleship. The board game, developed commercially during World War II and popularized during the Cold War, was a naval strategy guessing game with little plastic ships and white and red pegs indicating hit and missed offensive strikes. You will be forgiven for not remembering the game’s space aliens.

The film stars Hopper (Taylor Kitsch from another big-budget dud, John Carter) as a washed-up reject who would much rather be lounging in a bathrobe carving bongs out of Granny Smith apples. Hopper is very susceptible to persuasion: his brother tells him to join the Navy and in the next scene he’s in the Navy, and an officer no less even though it seems highly unlikely he has the required college degree. Hopper is introduced in a sequence where he slapsticks his way through a convenience store heist. He is sent there by a busty blonde who orders her dinners — microwave-cooked chicken burritos is no way to keep that figure — from the local dive bar. But when the bar’s kitchen is closed Hopper heads across the street to raid the burrito bin in one the film’s funnier moments.

I liked this scene. It is silly fun, Kitsch’s timing is perfect as he falls from the ceiling repeatedly, and I loved how it was shot using the store’s security camera footage. But there’s a catch, one that proves this movie is a sham: this whole botched burrito heist is shot-by-shot remake of actual security camera footage of a man “epic fail”-ing a real-life robbery. Search YouTube for “store robbery fail” and there it is on the first page. Like everything else in this movie, this scene is a fraud.

Later Hopper finds himself on one of three Navy boats off the Hawaiian coast when five alien UFOs land in the Pacific. One breaks up in the atmosphere and crash lands in Hong Kong after bumping into an orbiting satellite, yet strangely the others all survive intact even after they hit the concrete-hard water at re-entry speeds, but nevermind the physics. The UFOs take defensive positions and then zap a force field over all of Hawaii and the surrounding ocean. And then the aliens wait. Maybe they plan to invade, or maybe they’re just making a pitstop between galaxies — Battleship has no plans on telling us. Eventually the two sides start fighting each other, and then all hell breaks loose as the film careens ever forward on the wobbly presumption that since many people paid to see Transformers 3 they would do so again if this time it was called Battleship.

Like Transformers, this film makes no visual sense. It’s hard to tell what boat we’re looking at, who’s commanding it and where other characters are in relation to landmarks within each scene. The film’s spatial awareness is limited to only what is on the screen at any given point, which makes being an audience member tedious and oftentimes confusing. The special effects look nifty, but they only disqualify the film further from what our eyes recognize as visual continuity. For example: one of the three boats is a Japanese ship, but the film is shot with such complex irregularity it’s nearly impossible to figure out which one it is, and why the aliens decide to destroy it and not an American ship. In another sequence, I was sure two people were climbing up a mountain to get to a control room, but we later see they were climbing down even though in previous scenes the control room was shown to be on the mountain’s tip-top peak.

What’s so strange, though, is that each individual scene in Battleship is flawlessly shot. The Navy scenes could be recruitment videos. The makeout scenes with Hopper and his blonde could be a perfume ad, or a fashion video. The action scenes are remarkable video-game cinematics. But sandwich all these sequences together and all you get is baloney (instead of bologna). I call this Michael Bay Syndrome: every shot looks like either a music video or a TV commercial, but the movie, seen as a whole, is a rancid stew of hyper-stylized disjointed movie clips. It reminds me of what Roger Ebert said about Bay’s Armageddon: “Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer.”

The actors don’t make matters any better. Gravel-voiced Kitsch is completely unprepared for roles like this. One minute he’s leading his men into certain doom and the next he’s hogging all the glory by sniping alien cockpit windows from the bow. Something tells me the Navy would frown on his brand of showboating and freewheeling. Model Brooklyn Decker wasn’t hired for her acting abilities so I won’t waste time discussing them here. And Alexander Skarsgård, so great as Eric on True Blood, is given dialogue so inconceivably wooden that he needn’t wear a life preserver while at sea. And finally, what does it mean when Liam Neeson has the best performance in a movie? Trick question: nothing, Liam Neeson has he best performance in every movie he’s in. But what does it mean when pop star Rihanna (Umbrella … ella … ella … ella) has the second best performance in a movie? I’m still puzzling that answer, so let me know if you have one that makes sense.

Rihanna has a funny role: she’s in every scene. Apparently she’s the most qualified person on the boat. She’s in the engine room, the torpedo room, the forward hull, the upper deck, the missile launch center, the radar monitoring station and the bridge. Early in the film she controls a machine gun on a rubber boat as it goes out to greet the UFOs and during breaks in filming she swabbed the decks. Someone create an internet meme where Admiral Rihanna turns up randomly in other movies.

Some of the Navy scenes are exciting, including an AC/DC-blasted sequence where current and retired seamen join up to re-commission the USS Missouri, a battleship on display in Hawaii after the Navy switched to destroyers. Young sailors are shown side-by-side with old salty dogs (probably real Navy veterans) as they turn the Missouri museum into a fully functional war machine. This should have been the whole movie, but alas, it’s shortlived.

Before I sign off here, let me discuss one more scene. The aliens have jammed all the tracking equipment on the ships, so the crew has devised a plan to use tsunami warning buoys to track water displacement. On the ship’s computer screen the buoys form a grid with blipping dots representing a possible UFO location. All they can do is launch a missile and blindly hope they hit something. If you’ve ever played the Milton Bradley version of Battleship then you’ll recognize this as the object of the board game, which makes me wonder if Peter Berg ever does a version movie version of The Game of Life, would he embed a giant spinning wheel into the nearest mountain range? 

Battleship is one of the dumbest movies of the last couple years, and certainly one of the worst “big” movies ever made. The money it took to make it could have paid the medical bills of thousands of leukemia patients, or funded food banks for decades, or sent thousands of under-privileged teens to college. Instead, here it is, a floating debris field captained by a mini Michael Bay. 

Roll Call: five heroes too many in Avengers

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.