This is the kind of film comic geeks will lose sleep over. For the rest of us normal civilians, The Avengers is enjoyable fluff but ultimately just too predictable. Consider all the possibilities that director/screenwriter Joss Whedon (TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer) could have come up with for six superheroes on the one screen (and a reported US$220 million budget). And yet, what we have here is a by-the-numbers action flick—every single scene, conversation and element of character development (yeah, right!) serves only to get us to the final battle sequence when—non-spoiler alert—the Avengers get to save the earth.
In this sequel of sorts to last year’s Thor, the exiled demi-god Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is hell-bent on taking over the world with the help of the Chitauri, an alien race with their own aspirations to conquer the galaxy. To stop him, S.H.I.E.L.D. leader Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) brings together six superheroes—Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). That’s really all there is to it.
We can gloss over the special effects, the acting, the costumes and the plot (seriously, what plot?)—they’re all as competent as you’d expect for this sort of money. The pacing is insistent enough, littered with just the right amount of trite one-liners like, “In the end, it will be every man for himself,” to not entirely lose the attention of even the most dubious of viewers. And the actors are adept in their roles. But six superheroes in one movie simply means everything is spread far too thin. Ego gets in the way and there’s just no room for anything truly interesting to happen (though Hiddleston’s solitary Loki fares rather better).
Having sat through half a dozen movies all building up to this one (if there’s one good thing it’s that there’ll be no more of those “surprise” late cameos from Jackson), viewers are entitled to expect a lot, but they are to be sorely disappointed. The lack of character development means you’re only likely to marvel at six competing superheroes if you have an attention span of, say, six seconds. Some of us prefer our films to leave a little more of an impression.