The Avengers

dir: Joss Whedon

You know what this needed? More superheroes.

Not enough superheroes. Also, more scenes of Scarlett Johansson’s character Black Widow elaborating upon her back story. Because the masses needed to know.

Also, it needed more shots of Samuel L. Jackson flipping the tails of his long leather coat outwards in an ever so attractive manner.

Other than that, it’s about as good as we could have hoped for.

Despite the idea that this is a discrete ‘let’s get the band together’ supergroup combination, it’s really the sixth instalment in a series that started with Iron Man. All of the flicks I’m talking about had different directors, but the link between them all is that comic book titans Marvel set up Marvel Studios specifically to make the movies for their own properties. No longer would they have to rely on other studios to bring their stable of heroes to the big screen.

No longer would they have to share as much of the profits, either. As the sixth instalment (if you count the Hulk flick with Ed Norton, which we probably don’t have to), or fifth sequel, or whatever you want to call it, the groundwork has already been laid for all these characters, and for the promise (or threat) that they would eventually be brought together in an all-star cast match-up/mash-up. There were teases dropped in post credits on most of those flicks, or outright explicit references to getting the Avengers together for whatever reason.

And here are the fruits of their labours.

There's a lot of set up all the same, the only difference between that and the usual origin story stuff is that the set up is specific to the plot here, and not the individual sagas explaining how these chaps became the superheroic clods they've become.

Of course they pound in all the references to their origins and their motivations, but they don't belabour the point too much. Everyone gets their time to shine, and I mean everyone. Even second stringers like Black Widow (Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) get their dubious backstories filled in for our benefit, though I would wonder as to who in the audience really cared about them.

Maybe I'm being too cynical. It's been known to happen. Joss Whedon is at the helm in the true match between director and material, seeing as he's best known (and best loved) for creating tv shows with larger than life kinds of heroes, working and fighting together to save the world on a regular basis. What's less known is the amount of work he's done on actual comic book lines (not just Buffy and Angel, but Runaways and X-Men as well), so his familiarity with these highly geeky materials is presumably strong. He not only directs here, but worked on the screenplay too, so it's not a director-for-hire gig at all.

And it shows. There are beats, rhythms and such that Whedon is known for, and they're all in evidence here. Mostly, it's the humour. This flick only works if it's got us laughing, because they sure as shit can’t go for the Dark Knight level of mopey darkness and seriousness, because that will not wash.

Er, nah. I mean, they want us to take it seriously, and they don’t want us to laugh at how ludicrous the whole scenario is because the whole scenario, and a lot of these comic book type elements, are inherently pretty silly. Their main antagonist is a Norse god called Loki who can do all sorts of magic and has a magical spear that can make people his slaves if he tickles them with it. Yup.

Yes, no shit, that’s the Big Bad. Of course the devil’s in the details. With stuff like this, it’s how it’s done that matters; it’s how something which sounds childishly idiotic is realised that matters. And when it comes to Hollywood, Marvel, Disney and the rest, that childish idiocy is to their industry what crude substrate oil is to the oil companies.

It helps to have someone play Loki with such clear relish. The people behind the story pretty much have it both ways by letting Loki’s (and therefore Thor’s) status as whatever the hell they are remain somewhat ambiguous. As often as someone says “he’s not a god, he’s just a very naughty boy” or explains that the Asgardians are just members of some technologically advanced race of alien beings, you’ll have the self-same characters below “I am a God!” when the mood or the moment is upon them.

It hardly matters. For what it’s worth, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is a mischievous, smiling prick of an individual who decides that he wants to conquer Earth. He’s not saying he’s the best man for the job; he’s not saying he’s got all the answers. But he is saying that humanity are a bunch of cattle desperate to be ground under someone’s heel, because all this freedom bullshit just makes them sad in the end.

He delivers a lot of grinning malice in a very efficient length of time. Human life clearly has very little value to him, and who could blame him? After all, when you’ve got a giant gold helmet with some giant curling horns on it, of course the rest of humanity’s going to look like a bunch of hatless goons. And always with a smile on his face.

His theft of a bright blue maguffin, his killing of a bunch of people who work for S.H.I.E.L.D, some shadowy organisation run by a one-eyed leather clad Nick Fury (Samuel L), and his brainwashing of a couple of people whose faces we should be able to recognise means that Fury has to convince a bunch of Nietschean ubermensches to play nice and band together to stop some even bigger menace than Loki’s rakish grin and long, glowing spear.

Of course none of them want to play together. Like the heroes of Ayn Rand’s novels, these gods amongst men, humanity’s obvious superiors, don’t get along with other paragons who threaten their sense of being the biggest bad ass on the block, and singular individuals of essential uniqueness. In such a comics universe though, you’re only as unique as you’re written, so if they want to have it happen, it happens. Reluctantly at first, because you just can’t give up the goods on a first date, can you ladies, they find a way to help each other help themselves.

Most people I’ve spoken to about the film feel that Robert Downey Jnr walked away with the film insouciantly draped over his shoulder. I don’t entirely agree, and that’s mostly only because so much other stuff is going on, and enough other characters are pulling more than their own weight when it comes to embodying these gargantuan characters. So much time, also, is spent building up the Hulk’s eventual appearance, that it’s debatable whose flick it is.

Mark Ruffalo does a lovely job stepping into the purple pants of several predecessors. Of course the actor is irrelevant when the Big Guy finally turns up, but it takes a lot of work to get us to care that the Dr Jekyll is a decent man teetering on the edge of losing self-control, and that the Hyde is truly monstrous, but somehow heroic at the same time. It’s a complicated high-wire act, one of many, and I’ll leave it up to others to decide whether it worked for them or not.

When I say everyone gets their time in the sun, I mean everyone. Captain America (Chris Evans) even gets some time to mope and wonder whether he’s relevant anymore in a modern world, surrounded as he is by rage-fuelled giants, gods, geniuses in super-suits and assassins in skin tight outfits. He wonders whether he, and his costume, are a little old-fashioned.

In the corniest moment of the film, someone reassures him by saying, “maybe what the world needs is some of that “old fashioned””. He sells it, though, they sell it. You can’t avoid the corn if you’re going to avoid the treacle, and this has plenty of the former, and little of the latter.

And what treacle there is (someone’s death is played for maximum significance to the characters, but surely no-one in the audience cares. Surely?) is undercut through the revelation that it’s deliberate manipulation on the part of someone trying to get an end-result of great import: get the individuals to play together in order to Save the World!

As great as Loki is as an antagonist, and as great as the antagonism between the heroes is (resulting in some great smackdowns with deliberately unsatisfying resolutions), the ultimate enemy, being a race of, I don't know, things from somewhere else, felt somewhat rote. The heroes can't all be smacking around Loki at the same time, so we need a multiple level threat so that everyone can do what they do best simultaneously. How well it works or not, I don't know. We're entrenched in that epic battle for what feels like a long time, probably 40 minutes or so, and lots of stuff is going on. If some of it bores you, then wait a few seconds, and something else more to your liking will happen.

Yeah, sure, it all looks great (even in 2D like I watched it). Hulk especially looks tremendous fighting the alien menace, or fighting anyone, really. Mostly he's fighting his father's neglect, or his own self-image, or something, but he looks great doing it all the same.

Too many characters. Too many goddamn characters. I don't know exactly what a Cobie Smulders is, but I'm pretty sure it didn't need to be in this flick or to have that much dialogue. Her function is no different from Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), but he probably couldn't fit into her ridiculous bodysuits.

It has the mega-scale approach of, and I'm ashamed to mention it, the Transformers-level city- explodey type stuff, but I guess it's not as annoying as Michael Bay's exemplary works. The editing, while sharp, isn't calculated to eye-fuck the audience, and we actually somewhat care about the characters. At least some of them. There's enough of them so that you might really adore one or two of them at least.

There are an abundance of funny lines, this being more Whedon than Marvel, and greatly timed comedic moments (Hulk getting his own back on Thor, Thor explaining his relationship to Loki, Tony Stark asserting what remains when you take his suit away, a police officer not wanting to take orders from Cap and then rapidly changing his mind, Hulk's response after Loki calls him a dull creature, and many more), but the greatest moment occurs in Stuttgart, of all places, and is serious. The malevolent Loki commands a bunch of people to kneel before him like the inferior beings they are, and an older gentleman, who never thought his people would be in this position again, quietly refuses. The words exchanged between the two are great words, and the weary but determined way the man sticks up for himself was a beauty to behold.

I enjoyed it, and thought it was a hell of a lot of fun more than I thought it would be. It really felt like they'd creatively planned every second of the running time, every square inch of the setting and every moment otherwise in order to justify something that could have looked hackneyed and foolish. If it looks like the people making these Marvel properties can't make a mistake these days, remember that Marvel also spawned eye-gougingly awful tripe like the Fantastic Four films, the Ghost Riders, the Punishers, Spider-Man 3, that third X-Men flick and Elektra. Yeah, no-one remembers Elektra, but these were all terrible in their own special ways. Avengers assembling could have conjured up that level of crapulence, of unmitigated shiteness, and that it didn't I attribute, definitely unfairly, to one man, being Stan Lee.

No, I meant Joss Whedon. The world's pretty much his oyster now, since at time of writing the film has already made a billion dollars. And it's only taken him, what, twenty-plus years to get there? Still got time to pay your dues, chumly.

And did he really smuggle the words "mewling quim" into a PG-13 superhero flick?

Well done, sir, well done.

8 times with this flick's success, now every superhero flick is going to have more villains and superhero cameos than a Victorian-era transvestite's jewellry box out of 10

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“I am Loki, of Asgard. And I am burdened with glorious purpose.” – that you are, you handsome god – The Avengers