REVIEW: The Avengers (2012)

And so we reach the End Game of the franchise tentpole era, where after half a decade of backstories and post-credits teasing, six superheroes from four franchises all merge into one cross-branded synergistic supernova.  And make no mistake, the comic book supernova is big: for this attraction, we get aliens invading through a dimensional portal, Norse gods speaking faux Shakespeare (one of whom wears the single tackiest costume in megabudget history), an aircraft carrier that can fly, a hero whose superpower is archery, and a lot of devotion to the heroic feats, friendships, and inner struggles of men in costumes.  If that sounds corny, it is.  But if you want to make corniness hip, there's no one better than Joss Whedon, who knows that it doesn't need to be cool (not in any grown-up sense) so long as it's shameless.

So the plot is both somewhat complicated and somewhat irrelevant.  There's an evil demi-god, Loki, who's using an energy cube called the Tesseract to lead an alien invasion of Earth, so Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, with an eye-patch and a soul patch) assembles superheroes from Marvel lore and recent films to fight them off.  You can quibble over the specifics—if The Avengers magnifies everything about superhero movies, it also magnifies their plotholes.  But most of all, it's an excuse for icons to pose, fight, and punctuate each action with a line of banter.  Take your pick: there's Robert Downey, Jr., secure in the knowledge that the show is his to steal; Scarlett Johansson, as the latest of Whedon's foxy ass-kicking heroines; Jeremy Renner, excited by his invite to the big leagues; Chris Evans as Captain America, whose attitude is the closest to the heart of the film; Thor, without whose franchise none of this Loki business would be possible; and the Hulk, who after two failures to launch finally gets a big screen incarnation people will agree on.

In the end, The Avengers is not as momentous as it's made out to be, neither for Joss Whedon fans who want to see what he can do with a tentpole, nor on IMDb, where any franchise movie that has a stable script and charisma gets crowned one of the greatest ever made.  (Currently, The Avengers is #31 on the Top 250, which places it slightly behind Psycho and slightly ahead of Sunset Blvd.).  In many ways, it's actually a very ordinary case: an adventure movie stronger on star-power and special effects than story, where the stakes are everything and feel like nothing, shepherded by a talented director who's partway allowed to do his own thing but largely has to toe the franchise line.

But if anything makes it a cut above—aside from the zingers that Whedon slips in—its the commitment to the material.  It's very telling that the word "old-fashioned" keeps appearing, and that the superhero fandom of a supporting character becomes a pivotal plot point, because that's where the film finds its larger, more covert meaning.  And in an era where comic book franchises spring up left and right—and sometimes twice—it's certainly one of the most pure and innocent, if only because it nobly embraces the inherent silliness of it all.  The highlight of the film for me, aside from everything Robert Downey Jr. says, comes during the final brawl, where one unbroken tracking shot through the New York skies shows each superhero fighting his own small battle.  You can't deny the giddy thrill, nor can you deny how ridiculous it is.  Forget epic adventure—this is a celebration of pop culture, and it comes at a time when very little in pop culture seems worth defending.  Rock on.

4 out of 5 stars.

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The Avengers is currently in theaters, breaking lots of records.