93% Marvel's The Avengers

As blockbuster summer movies go, it'd be hard to point to movie that's been more hotly anticipated that Marvel Studio's The Avengers. Building on the success of Iron Man 1 and 2, Thor, Captain America and The Incredible Hulk, the film has become more than just a cool looking superhero movie; it's become an event four years in the making. And as vertically integrated, $200 million tent pole films go, The Avengers is pretty great. As a standalone feature, writer/director Joss Whedon has made a success though ultimately hallow film.The Avengers concept, a team of all of Marvel Comics biggest and brightest superheroes, was first hinted in a stinger played after the first Iron Man and has slowly eaten up more and more screen time with every Marvel Studios release. Iron Man 2 including allusions to the events of The Incredible Hulk and had a stinger that plays into the second act of last year's Thor, which along with Captain America had post credits cliffhangers that led directly into the opening of The Avengers. You'd think with all of this careful interweaving, some of which was written and directed by Whedon, that there'd be a minimum of exposition but no, pages and pages of dialogue are dedicated to filling the audience in on the who's who of Marvel's cinematic universe. This does tend to grate but The Avengers needed to be understandable enough for audiences who may have avoided the lower grossing Captain America and Hulk movies. To the film's credit it gives us the first version of the Hulk that works on the big screen. Mark Ruffalo plays the character of Bruce Banner not as depressed, ticking time bomb but a weary altruist. His Banner has found a kind of peace not by hiding from the anger but embracing his inner monster as a part of himself that he must work to control rather that eradicate. This subtle character recalibration makes the character active instead of reactive for the first time and works as the most successful aspect of the film and it's a logical choice when it's understood that Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark was already one the film's main attractions.The integration of Chris Evans' Captain America into the franchise works in a similar way but to a less successful degree, his innate heroism and selflessness standing in contrast to the more ignoble Iron Man. Those plainly uncalculated qualities make Evans' character the heart of the film though in retrospective it's clear that his character has no real arc. At the start of the film he's man trying to find his purpose in a world that's seemingly left him behind and at the end he's still trying to find himself but now he has some friends. The character needed a speech, something rousing in the second act of the film, to really become a man that was once described as having a voice that could command God. The lack of character development can be overlooked in a two and half hour film that has to keep so many plates in the air but the same can't be said of Chris Hemsworth's Thor. The character, who was so charming in his eponymous film, barely makes an impression here. He's visually impressive in scenes where he smacks around Iron Man/the Hulk/dozens of non-descript aliens with hammer and it was a smart choice for Whedon to keep up Thor's running gag of undercutting the thunder gods pomposity by knocking him out at random intervals but that's all there is to him here. It's telling that when all of the other characters are recovering and bounding in the aftermath of a large scale attack by Loki's (Tom Hiddleston) forces, Thor stands in a field reaching for his hammer. All of the sub plots introduced in Thor will hopefully be addressed in Thor 2 because their completely glossed over here which is especially baffling in light of the fact that Thor's antagonist is also the villain for The Avengers and that character doesn't feel as underserved.Hiddleston gives a grand performance as the trickster god Loki. Eloquent and cruel with a big Kubrick smile, stands out in movie made to sell Big Gulps. His character is essentially as arc-less as his brother Thor but Hiddleston makes it work. Whether he's in Germany doing his best Hitler impression or sneering one of Whedon's signature misogynist rants at Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson), he's the most captivating presence on screen. As with Michael Fassbender, one hopes that he'll find work more suited for his considerable talents. Johansson's Widow has more to do here than she did in Iron Man 2 and handles the material ably. Since this is a Joss Whedon production, the lead female character is extremely capable and unspeakable damaged. What little backstory we get on the character suggests a lifetime of sanctioned murder and while it was certainly necessary to depict her character as someone who could stand side by side with a Norse god and super solider, the Widow's darkness stands in contrast to the four color world of the Avengers. As does her fellow unpowered Avenger Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), a cartoonishly precise marksman who spends most of the film under Loki's mystical thrall. It's impressive so see Renner pump arrows in alien monsters from what appears to be several city blocks away while looking in the opposite direction but that awe is undercut when you're reminded that his character is a "master assassin."That uncomfortable blend of wide eyed wonder and grounded cynicism pervades the film. This is because while it ostensibly was adapted from the comic book series of the same name created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, its aesthetic is drawn from an Avengers revamp called The Ultimates created in 2002 by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch. As opposed to the bombastic and genuinely inspiring Avengers, The Ultimates was darkly comic and ultra-violent series about the pitfalls of super humanity and featured a cast of antiheroes and black ops assassins who battled themselves as often as any supervillian. The Avengers mostly draws its characterization from the Avengers series proper, but the film's Black Widow, Hawkeye and Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) are clearly taken from the more recent series. The awkwardness of this character mix and match is most evident in Jackson's Fury, a conniving but mostly heroic character in the proper Marvel Universe, he's an ends justify the means schemer in the Ultimate Universe who's increasingly sinister machinations ultimately drive the Ultimates to break away from the government entirely. In the film, Jackson's Fury is responsible for both Loki's return into our world and the formation of the Avengers, the former though experiment with Asgardian technology and the latter by using the death of a colleague to motivate the team to action. While his actions in the film are somewhat justified by the magnitude of the threat he faces, he's still a morally repugnant character. In spite of the film's questionable morality and uneven characterization, it's a fun ride. Whedon knows how to tell a story, even one as groupthinked to death as The Avengers is. He cracked the Hulk, developed a villain good enough to stand with the greats and he didn't mess with a working formula. The film, aside from a few unsavory characters and third act nuclear holocaust, is a light hearted affair that stands as Marvel Studios funniest and most rousing film since the first Iron Man. Whedon found a way to mix anthemic, Michael Bay-style action set pieces with enough human moments to make a blockbuster that really connects. Because of the numerous layers of corporatization that the film had to go through to get to the screen it doesn't have much of a voice but it's never boring or wearying. As a summer action movie that was required to provide a logical continuation of four different strains of the superhero genre, The Avengers was a success. The film never feels like too much of one thing and not enough of another. But it's not a great genre defining film like Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight was. It's possible that because of its crazy quilt nature in never could be, being the next chapter from four other franchises or because Whedon is ultimately a writer's director working in a genre that requires a visual thinker. No one complains about the weak characterization in Transformers: Dark of the Moon or the poor lead performance in Inception because skyscrapers get knocked over and Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a zero gravity fist fight. There is no single sequence in The Avengers that's good as the above mentioned scenes and while there are probably a number of valid reasons why that is, at the end of day The Avengers remains a good but not great movie.

May 9, 2012

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