By WARREN DAY
To paraphrase the Weather Girls’ hit song, “It’s raining Superheroes” at your movie multiplex. Officially known as “Marvel’s The Avengers” (after Marvel Comics, the film’s literary source) has 6.5 superheroes—Ironman, Thor, Captain America, Black Widow (the movie’s only heroine), the Incredible Hulk, Hawkeye the Archer, and an eye-patch wearing guy named Nick Fury as their beleaguered organizer.
There’s a long tradition in Hollywood of taking popular individual characters and putting them together in the same movie. Universal Studios made a fortune doing that with Dracula, the Wolfman, and Frankenstein’s monster, but this film may set the record for its sheer number.
The fact that the filmmakers pull it off so well in this quintessential popcorn movie is something of a show-biz miracle, the equivalent of a page-turner in pulp fiction, and culminates in nothing less than nerd Nirvana. For some time now we’ve been teased in the post-credit endings of the various “Ironman,” “Thor,” and “Captain America” movies that a combined movie story was coming. The success of those films, along with the 49 year history of these comic book series, has guaranteed huge worldwide interest.
Right from the starting gate, “The Avengers” was the number one boxoffice hit in every one of the 52 countries where it opened—including the U.S., where it enjoyed the biggest first weekend in history. As of this publication date, the film will rank in the top ten greatest grossing movies of all time. The fact that the movie is also a solid work of entertainment is mainly due to the fanboy’s best friend in Hollywood, Joss Whedon, who directed and wrote the screenplay.
Whedon—who was responsible for the cult-favorite TV series, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”—pulls off a juggling act here by giving each of the superheroes some special moments while creating a cohesive teambased film. The story is a kind of sequel to 2011’s “Thor,” with Thor’s evil brother Loki here seeking to conquer the earth. (Don’t all super-villains want to conquer our little blue planet?)
This crisis impels government super-agent Nick Fury to bring together all the superheroes “to fight a foe that no superhero can fight alone,” thus ensuring not only the confrontation with Loki and his army, but also a clash of the super-egos. These may be the good guys, but they aren’t very good at playing with others. As Whedon says, “These people shouldn’t be in the same room, let alone on the same team—and that is the definition of family.”
It’s also a situation that’s ripe for both drama and comedy, and what keeps “The Avengers” such serious fun is that it’s often so seriously funny. Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark/Ironman provides much of the quips and rejoinders. Chris Hemsworth is the divinely handsome Norse god Thor, and Chris Evans is chiseled and idealistic Captain America.
All three played these roles in separate previous movies. Mark Ruffalo becomes the third actor to play Bruce Banner (while the “Hulk” continues to be a CGI visual effect), but this divided hero works better here than he did in the two films devoted totally to him—“Hulk” in 2003, and “The Incredible Hulk in 2008 (maybe less Hulk is better than more). Scarlett Johansson is the dressed-inblack- leathers Black Widow, an idealized version of an adolescent view of the femme fatale.
Jeremy Renner stars as Hawkeye, and Samuel L. Jackson is Nick Fury. Superhero movies are only as good as their supervillain, and Tom Hiddleston as Loki (the Norse god of chaos) certainly fulfills that hiss-able role. Like every big effects movie that begins production with an opening weekend set firmly in stone, the visual effects here are uneven, with some of the CGI (computer generated images) appearing truly awesome, while others look somewhat rough and incomplete.
In the end the plot seems more an excuse for a $220 million demolition derby than it is epic storytelling, but its saving grace is that it’s able to spoof these larger-than-life heroes without demeaning them. Although providing a much better than average night at the movies, I am concerned that “The Avengers,” and the deluge of other comic book-inspired movies, only serves to deepen the dominating adolescent-mania of American films that’s reflected in so many of today’s comedies and action movies.
So often these days the protagonists are either far more powerful and intelligent—or more juvenile and dumb—than we should expect any grown-up to be. What’s wrong with a more varied movie menu, where the ideas are as big as the explosions, and which includes funny and exciting stories that show that it’s no fantasy what kinds of challenges ordinary folks can overcome? Sometimes you also need an escape to reality.
