Reviews

The Avengers


Acting
Directing
Story
Action
Final Thoughts

First entry into Avengers series is a solid action movie, with surprise performances by cast and non-stop fun.

Overall Score 4
Readers Rating
0 votes
0

I don’t know what was the main idea when authors of Marvel comics decided to create The Avengers “initiative”. Maybe just they were bored with stand-alone heroes, or just ran out of fresh ideas. In any way, what done is done and several decades later it was decided – a movie should be made!

I see a practical challenge of fitting all the characters into one single movie and not actually losing the grip on the sanity on the screen. I mean, on one hand you have Iron Man, so profoundly shown to be an actual real-life person by couple of previous films. Let’s face it, out of all the heroes he is the only one that does have any chance of existence in modern world. And then you have Thor, whose presence is already something that can shatter anyone’s assumptions in the realism of the stuff happening on the screen. So for the sake of argument, lets say that they do exist together, and that Black Widow is an extremely useful character in the storyline progression.

On the one good night, alien “God” Loki (Tom Hiddleston) comes to Earth with the ultimate quest to destroy freedom and to become the master of Earth. He steals the secret cube called Tesseract (the one recovered from Captain America film) from secret underground research facility, prompting Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to enable “Avengers Initiative”. Which is essentially, calling in all the heroes and assembling a team out of them in order to save the world. These heroes are billionaire Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans) being recovered from 70-year long frozen state, experiment gone bad Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) with uncontrollable rage issues, extreme assassin Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). Somewhere along the road Loki’s half-brother Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and marksman Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) join the action. Problem is none of this heroes, well except for Captain America, have any idea of teamwork, or even team mentality, nor they actually can be with each other in one room and not end up arguing about any random stuff. In any case, this is what humankind is resolved to be saved by.

Yes, this is as dull as it might get, but don’t get me wrong, movie outmatches its plot by a mile. What you have on a paper is so different with the presentation on the screen, that you are going to be surprised. “The Avengers” is precisely made action movie.

First of all, its made by Joss Whedon, who utilizes all his knowledge and experience gained mostly in “Firefly” era to create incredibly action-packed CGI sequences. Story never stalls, it never hits a bottleneck, which is especially important since the length of the film is way above 2 hours. The other challenge is giving all the heroes screen time to develop themselves AND to fight with each other. That is of course before they develop chemistry and start acting like a team. And boy, do they fight with each other.

Secondly, since the film doesn’t try to be serious there’s a huge challenge to keep it fun. And the fun is there. Especially in the face of Iron Man, who as in previous movies can and will deliver funny one-liners that never get boring.

Thirdly, in a “brainless” action movie you don’t expect much acting. BUT you gonna have a surprise here. And although Robert Downey, Jr. as an Iron  Man is established character with appropriate attitude, the other cast members offer much better interpretation of their according characters. Chris Evans’ Captain America is righteous person struggling to fit in an unfamiliar environment. Chris Hemsworth’s Thor is much less macho and more sensible God than his portrayal in horrible horrible movie “Thor”. Scarlett Johanson is as sexy as she can be as Black Widow. And then there’s Mark Ruffalo, who plays much better Hulk than anyone before, managing to show the tragedy of his character. The only cast member I was kinda disappointed is Samuel L. Jackson. I suppose the reason is I always imagine him screaming curse words and kicking some serious ass instead of walking around and being bossy.

And last, there’s 3D, which I found really nice. Its not there for the sake of it, its there to make movie better. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I say this was the best movie shot in 3D that I have seen so far.

So we have an extremely fun movie. Go and watch it if you like action.

8/10