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The Avengers

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Me and the wifey went to see The Avengers on Sunday.  I was expecting to see a blockbuster movie chock full of action and fancy special effects, and in that way it delivered.  What I wasn’t expecting were several laugh-out-loud moments, one of which I was laughing so hard I became dizzy and damn near passed out.

I have a feeling true hard-core Marvel fans would likely be upset with the addition of humor to the movie, but I found that the humor was well done and enhanced the movie.

The plot isn’t very complex, which I expected.  Basically, Loki has teamed up with the Other to conquer Earth, which his brother Thor has vowed to protect.  Loki has promised the Other the Tesseract, an energy source of unimaginable power, in exchange for a Chitauri army with which to invade the earth.

Loki somehow opens a portal directly to the Tesseract and is able to subjugate a handful of SHIELD operates to assist him with stealing the Tesseract.  Nick Fury then rounds up the members of the scuttled Avengers Initiative, including Tony Stark (Iron Man), Bruce Banner (The Hulk), and Steve Rogers (Captain America).

The team is initially skeptical of each other, and divided on how to attack Loki.  They also become skeptical of SHIELD’s intentions.  However, they eventually begin to work as a team and the heroes win in the end.

The Good

As I said, the plot isn’t very complex or intellectually stimulating, but humor, good acting, and kick-ass special effects more than make up for it.  Robert Downy Jr. once again reprises his role as Iron Man and does a fantastic job with it.  Chris Evans does a serviceable job as Captain America, as does Chris Hemsworth as Thor.  Scarlett Johansson does a pretty good job as the Black Widow and has a few punch lines in the movie. Tom Hiddleston does an excellent job, I think, of playing Loki, a deluded alien with godlike powers hell-bent on ruling the Earth.  I think there’s nothing better in a movie such as this than a good villain and Hiddleston nailed it.  Samuel L Jackson does an adequate job as Nick Fury, and Cobie Smulders (of How I Met Your Mother fame) was surprisingly good in her action scenes.

The special effects were obviously exquisite, as the movie cost over $200 million to make and has been in production for years.  There are no complaints about that here.

The humor in this movie makes it stand out from all of the movies leading up to The Avengers.  Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and Captain America (which I haven’t seen yet) were good in their own right, but were devoid of humor for the most part.  The Iron Man movies embraced humor and that’s what made them so much better than the other movies previously mentioned.

The Bad

I have little criticism of this movie.  The only thing I would have changed about this movie is the casting of Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner.  That’s not to say that Ruffalo did a bad job, but Edward Norton did better.  Marvel did attempt to bring Norton on for this movie, but negotiations between the two failed so the part went to Ruffalo.

Other than that, I have no criticism of this movie.

Overall

I loved this movie and plan to take the twins to see it on Wednesday, which goes to show how much I love this movie.  The only other movie I’ve seen more than once in a theater is Revenge of the Sith.  If you enjoy comic book movies or action movies, this movie is for you.

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