The Avengers

Signalling the arrival of summer at the box office, Marvel Comics unleashes The Avengers amidst a fever of anticipation from fans chomping at the bit ever since being teased at the end credits of The Incredible Hulk four years ago.  The Avengers juggles no less than eight main characters, including six superheroes, four of them hot-on-the-heels of their own headlining films, one Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson in extended cameo mode), and one villain, an inexplicable Loki from Thor.  A massive undertaking for any film, the sheer size of the cast and personality of the characters demand careful attention above and beyond basic storytelling to insure that anyone's favorite hero is given adequate screentime and ample opportunity for their winning peculiarities.  It goes without saying that summer blockbusters get criticized for lavishing attention on special effects while giving short shrift to the story and screenplay, and unfortunately The Avengers is not immune, itself guilty of trading story for its own unique special effect of having too many characters.

I'd been worried all throughout the development history of The Avengers, and it only increased with the release of each subsequent Marvel Universe film, which added more and more characters, until the cast itself began to rightfully eclipse any claim the film could ultimately have on its own story development.  A logistical nightmare, veteran TV creator Joss Whedon (Serenity, Buffy The Vampire Slayer) was brought on board to write and direct, drawing from his long tenure on the small screen, where neverending storylines and a revolving door cast are just part of the daily grind.  And because of this it is no secret that is primarily where The Avengers excels; it doesn't matter who your favorite Avenger is, you will not be disappointed.  Robert Downey Jr. has plenty of rapid-fire cynical barbs as Iron Man, Captain America has more than one opportunity to wear his soldier on his sleeve, Thor owns his neanderthal babe-in-the-woods naivete, Bruce Banner anguishes over his fate as the Hulk, and Loki, well, that leads to the various problems.

The story, such as it is, concerns a glowing blue cube of endless energy called the tesseract, stolen out from under Nick Fury's watchful eye by Loki, who wants to harness its power to take over the world.  Not in the way one would think though, manipulating power struggles within corporate, political and scientific spheres by controlling something that everyone wants; no, Loki wants to open a portal in the sky through which a bunch of creatures from another world can enter and proceed to destroy everything.  So nondescript and unimaginative are these creatures, they will have you wishing they were Frost Giants.  Fury quickly scrambles together the Avengers, his dream team of superheroes, and from then everything is on autopilot, subsequent flaws arising from the stubbornness that comes with keeping things as simple as possible for greater clarity among the many characters.  The first ten minutes is the heist of the tesseract.  The next thirty minutes is spent gathering the team.  And the middle hour, before the last forty-five minute showdown, might as well be a play, as the screenplay forces all the characters into a ship (read: one location) utilizing one of the most hoary cinematic devices to keep the budget low.  Our superheroes spend most of this time standing around arguing their various ideologies while occasionally managing to drop hot-button issues into the conversation.  "Blah blah blah weapons of mass destruction, blah blah blah sustainable energy, blah blah blah government corruption, blah blah blah liberty" is all I heard, while trying to keep the idea out of my head that I was being "handled" by the filmmakers.  There is a prevailing arrogance about the film that the characters themselves should be reason enough to see it, and it is in this protracted segment where self-conscious, overwritten banter expects to substitute for the wall-to-wall-action a film like this should have had no problem delivering.  Instead, a good half hour of screentime is spent languishing over Bruce Banner's need to keep the Hulk under wraps, and borderline abusing the audience with nonstop teasing, as if two things were not a foregone certainty: one, that we haven't already seen this transformation in previous films, and two, that when he does transform it is going to be a complete surprise.

And then there is Loki.  Absolutely vital to Thor, the only other recent Marvel film besides Iron Man that I have enjoyed, where an admittedly large amount of exposition was finessed by Shakesperean overtones, here he comes off as a pushover.  We've already seen him get in over his head with a race of creatures.  We've already seen him wrestle with his adoption issues.  He's a joke, and the creatures he brings through the portal are so underwritten, and so conceptually ugly, the fact that we have to watch them engage the Avengers in fist fights becomes little more than an understandable extension of the laziness behind their inclusion.  Marvel could learn a thing or two about villainy from DC, which I anxiously hope will silence everyone who is currently lauding The Avengers's greatness, when The Dark Knight Rises is released on July 20th.  A film is only as good as its villain, and so far the Marvel Universe has no idea how to create a good one.  Thor and Iron Man have come the closest, with the worst offender being Captain America, with scene after scene of Red Skull making grand proclamations only to retreat immediately upon confrontation.  That stuff might work in a comic book, which has much more in common with television than cinema, but for an event like this it doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts.

The Avengers is an enjoyable ENOUGH ride, though soon forgotten like so much else at the theatre these days.  A better writer and director could have given the film a more lasting impression, with more gravity and excitement, but then it also could have just as easily derailed it into a jumble of half-written character turns.  As it stands, it succeeds only in those areas critical for market testing, hence the record breaking grosses, but otherwise it's just too busy to expand on any emotions that you don't already bring into the theatre with you, and too static to warrant repeat viewings.  No doubt the Marvel Universe will continue to expand, but until it understands that growth does not just mean an increase in size, The Avengers series will never be more than a greatest hits collection of its biggest failures.

*** out of ***** stars