The Avengers is a very
entertaining movie and gets the adrenaline going, which isn’t quite the same
thing as saying it’s totally successful or rises that far above what it is. Written by Joss Whedon and Zak Penn and
directed by Whedon, it’s an oddly schizoid movie. On one side are wonderfully witty lines with
often hysterically snarky dialog while on the other side are serious, earnest and
highly dramatic tete a tetes that fall flat on their face. On one side are the vibrant actors and Oscar
nominees (Robert Downey, Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Samuel L. Jackson and Jeremy
Renner) and on the other are film personalities with pretty faces (Chris
Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston and Chris Evans)--and no matter how equal the
writers may try to make the various superheroes when it comes to their powers,
Evans will never be able to Eve Harrington Downey when it comes to Stanislavksy. (For those keeping score, Scarlett Johansson
falls somewhere in the middle, which in many ways reflects her role in the
movie, a character trying to bridge the gap between all the antagonistic good
guys.) And finally on one side you have
large scale action sequences filled with massive set pieces of uninhibited,
glorious destruction (Manhattan now seems to be the new Tokyo, destined to be
destroyed on a regular basis due to the specter of 9/11 in the way Japan is haunted
by the atomic bomb) and on the other side is very little death (see Battle for
LA in contrast—for The Avengers the studio apparently wanted to challenge the
audience, but in a very non-challenging way).
As was noted, Whedon and Penn have a way with a snarky line (the best
written scene is when all the heroes are in one room and due to the influence
of Loki, get under each other’s skins saying all the mean things everyone in
the audience is thinking). But when it
comes to heavy scenes, the authors can do little but immediately make fun of
them once they’re over (Whedon had the same issue in Cabin in the Woods—the unbearable
scenes of overage teenagers in distress were only made palatable, if that, by
the more comic scenes of Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford). These more serious sequences might have had a
better chance if all the actors were of equal caliber (there’s actually a very
nice one between Ruffalo and Downey that suggests this); but this was
ultimately a battle, unlike the one against Loki, the superheroes simply could
not win (for an example, take the scene between Thor and Loki that Iron Man
aptly described as Shakespeare in the Park).
The whole thing culminates with a knock down, drag out for the Big Apple
when some aliens resembling the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz make their
way through some sort of space time continuum and unleash their blitzkrieg upon
an unsuspecting metropolis. The battle
itself is not exactly boring, but it also isn’t that imaginative and all in
all, pretty derivative (again, it’s the snarky wit and two hysterically funny
bits by the Hulk that really made this work as well as it does). The special effects are, of course, first
rate, though none may quite equal the SFX of Gwyneth Paltrow in Daisy Dukes
(though one does shudder at the idea of this fashion style making a comeback
since very few people can get away with short shorts—I know, I’ve tried). The ending is resolved through a deux ex
machina provided by Stellan Skarsgard (let’s face it, the plot is a bit
clunky—c’mon, be honest with yourselves and give the devil his due) as well as
an inconsistency with how much control Bruce Banner has over his green (ho, ho,
ho) alter ego (apparently, it corresponds to the needs of the script at any
given time). But in the end, The
Avengers is a perfectly fine time waster.
It’s no Iron Man or The Dark Knight, but, hey, it could have been
worse. It’s also no Spiderman III,
Superman or Fantastic Four.
About Me
- Howard Casner
- PLEASE NOTE: I have moved my blog to http://howardcasner.wordpress.com/. Please follow the link for all my updated postings. Thank you.
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