The Avengers User Reviews

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The Avengers has always been an ambitious project. An incredible amount of time and money have been poured into the Marvel franchises and its fans have been waiting a long time to see it culminate in all our heroes on screen together.

Suffice to say, it does not disappoint.

Loki is the villain of the movie and his plans to take over Earth centre on an energy source of seemingly endless potential: the Tesseract. He arrives at the main S.H.I.E.L.D facility to steal it and also turns the minds of some of its agents in order to make a safe getaway. In desperation, Nick Fury makes the call to start assembling The Avengers.

As is to be expected with so many big-personality characters who are all stars in their own right, there is conflict as they start to come together. The physical conflict was thrilling to watch and the verbal sparring just as entertaining. This is a film whose script managed to exceed expectations. It balances the all-out action with charm and a satisfying amount of humour - some of Stark's one-liners produced some honest-to-god guffaws in my theatre (“Phil? His first name is ‘Agent’ "he says near the beginning, referring to Agent Coulson).

Also satisfying was the amount of screen time that each character gets and I'm not just talking about the titular characters. We managed to get a sense of the complex relationship between Hawkeye and Black Widow through some backstory as well as some amazing action scenes (is there anything Hawk's bow can't do?). In particular, Black Widow impressed me. I haven't read any of the comics so the only knowledge I have of this character is from Iron Man 2 where she ... didn't impress me all that much. Here we get to see her put more of her skills into play and she is a smart, strong kick-ass character I now want to see more of.

In addition to the quality of the writing, there were some standout performances from the actors - in particular Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk and Tom Hiddleston. Ruffalo brings something new to the table in a character whose true potential has perhaps, not been reached in his previous films. It actually made me want a new Hulk movie and that's not something I thought I'd ever say. And Tom Hiddleston as the God of Mischief managed to build his character through stripping away some of his layers. In other words, he completely owned that role.

The S.H.I.E.L.D agency is another thing that I would have liked to see more of. Nick Fury was still present in all his bad-ass glory but largely takes a back-seat role through the action, along with Agent Hill (played by Cobie Smulders). The agency's motives were another source of conflict in the first half of the movie and not even Fury seemed entirely comfortable with the darker direction they seemed to be heading in. It certainly opened the door to delve deeper into the conflict in future films.

The final act of the movie was an all-out action blockbuster that perfectly summed up what a summer blockbuster should be. Visually, it was very impressive to watch and The Hulk, in particular, stood out. The only negative was that the enemy is mostly made up of the generic army that Loki is now in charge of. With no unique abilities to speak of, they all blend together in a sea of space filler. But a shot of all our Avengers finally standing together made it all worth it - believe me!

The Avengers is one more in a string of recent examples that shows Marvel knows how to make comic -book movies right. Perhaps the best example in fact. The movie may run for nearly two and a half hours but with so much going on, you never really become aware of the fact. In fact the movie could easily have run much, MUCH longer - some things (like S.H.I.E.L.D and it's agents) could have benefited with more time to delve deeper but realistically, you have to draw the line somewhere. This is a movie that has done a fine job in balancing its screentime between developing its many characters and some mind-blowing action and to top it all off, it does so with style and wit. New-comers will enjoy this but it's the fans who will be in for a real treat.