The Avengers (2012)

     Well, here it is: the monster at the end of the book. The slow ramp-up to The Avengers began back in 2008, with a sneaky little post-credits scene added to the surprisingly wonderful Iron Man in which superspy Nick Fury comes to talk to Tony Stark about “the Avengers initiative.” From then on, the Avengers movie showed quite a bit of initiative, as each Avenger-to-be received his own movie or sequel (Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, Thor) or, as in the case of Fury and his fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, small parts in one or more of those films. The bad news for the franchise was that middle films were of varying quality. The good news is that the payoff film featuring the full complement of Avengers hearkens back to the beginning, having much in common with Iron Man in terms of tone and quality. The Avengers is good, smart fun.

     The plot concerns, as all superhero supergroup movies must, a potential world-wide catastrophe. The alien demigod Loki (Tom Hiddleston) returns from exile to deep space and snatches a powerful blue cube called the Tesseract (last seen in Captain America) from S.H.I.E.L.D. custody. With the Tesseract, Loki (still carrying a chip on his shoulder from his defeat in Thor) plans to open a portal to a faraway galaxy and let invading aliens have their way with earth, which they will then give to the power-hungry “god” to rule. To combat this demonic (divine?) threat, Nick Fury calls together the various superheroes S.H.I.E.L.D. has been tracking throughout their previous exploits. These include playboy genius Tony Stark, a/k/a Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.), genetically-modified supersoldier Captain America (Chris Evans), Loki’s more noble demigod brother Thor (Chris Hemsworth), and Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) – a quirky physics expert who literally has a monster of a temper. Also suiting up are two S.H.I.E.L.D. agents – martial artist/interrogation expert Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson), codenamed the Black Widow, and master archer/sniper Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), known as Hawkeye. Together, these heroes actually stand a chance of stymying Loki’s evil scheme – provided, that is, they can all get along. It turns out that the biggest threat to the Avengers may be the Avengers themselves – after all, that’s a lot of super-egos in one room (or, rather, one flying aircraft carrier…but I digress…).

     The plot itself, actually, is pretty thin stuff, and in the Tesseract The Avengers has a classic sci-fi MacGuffin (that thing everyone must have, or else). The film succeeds because screenwriter/director Joss Whedon keeps the focus where he knows it’s more interesting: on the Avengers as characters. It’s tempting to think of The Avengers as a sort of comic-book version of Ocean’s Eleven, where each member of a team brings special skills to bear on a caper. And while this isn’t wrong, there’s a way in which The Avengers really plays more like the comic-book version of MTV’s early The Real World seasons: what in the world happens when you put this group of people together? The strength of this strategy (in addition to the fact that unity-from-squabbling is a trope Whedon does well) is that it keeps each Avenger from simply being a function—the strong man, the tech whiz, etc.—and allows them to have real motives, quirks, vices, and virtues. The movie takes time to introduce and actually explore each character, and allows them to act as they really might, not just as the plot requires. Yes, this movie ends with a Really Big Battle wherein the Avengers take on Loki’s alien hordes (and what I can only describe as “armored flying prehistoric fish of death.” I’m not kidding.), but by then we have come to know enough about the characters to understand who’s who, why they’re doing what they are, and why we should care about them. The film also has time for real thoughts. Like Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, it philosophizes in a low-grade way, here about the nature of freedom and the virtues of teamwork. Much has been made of Joss Whedon’s helming this film, and he does turn out to be the perfect choice. Whedon has always excelled at elevating genre pieces above their conventions, and it’s that gift, more than any sort of stunning originality, that he brings to The Avengers.

    Well, OK – that gift and a gift for snappy dialogue. Fans of the sort of left-turn wisecracks and cultural references Whedon sprinkled throughout earlier outings like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Serenity will find much to love here as well. And it helps that he has a troupe of actors –particularly Downey, Jackson, and Ruffalo – who have a way with verbal timing (Whedon’s penchant for movie-reference epithets especially suits Downey’s Tony Stark). The acting in The Avengers is solid across the board, no doubt helped by the fact that almost all involved have tried out these characters before. Downey is beautifully glib as Stark; Hemsworth is the right mix of cocky and noble as Thor; Evans brings suitably old-fashioned matinee-idol earnestness to “Cap;” and Jackson once again brings an iron edge to Nick Fury, who I would call “no-nonsense” except that he spends the entire film putting up with all manner of nonsense. An exception to this returning-gig rule is Ruffalo, who took over the Banner/Hulk role from Edward Norton, who in turn took it over from Eric Bana. Ruffalo, mostly known for indie film work, brings a kind of understatement to the part that both suits a man literally trying to keep part of himself under wraps and plays nicely off the more in-your-face performances of, say, Downey and Hemsworth. Also worthy of mention once again is Hiddleston’s work as Loki, who is one of the more Shakespearean comic book villains. By turns menacing, insufferable, and even sympathetic, Loki is a suitably complex foil to a complex group of do-gooders—and who better than a god of chaos to sow discord in an already troubled alliance? Hiddleston’s got some game, and I wish his Loki many happy sequel returns, as this one surely was. Renner, close on the heels of Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol adds nicely to his action-hero resume as the deadly Hawkeye, and, as Ms. Romanoff, Johansson gets to prove (as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Summer Glau, and Eliza Dushku have before her) that you never, never, never want to mess with the women in a Joss Whedon project.

     A small question is how well this film stands on its own. The Avengers is surely a richer experience for those who have knowledge of the earlier lead-in movies (who will, among other things, have more understanding of the small roles played by Gwyneth Paltrow, Stellan Skarsgard, and Clark Gregg). Since I’ve seen a number of those, I can’t say. I don’t think, however, that they are required viewing. The events are explicable (or inconsequential) enough to get by on, and the characters more than speak for themselves. In some cases, pulling the heroes together to compete for screen time forces the culling of unnecessary elements that marred the earlier films (the half-baked demigod-earthling romance from Thor, for example, is not missed, and Tony Stark is allowed to get thoughtful but not to wallow in his vices). Well-acted, smarter than average, and thoroughly entertaining, The Avengers is the first “big” action movie of summer 2012, and it’s a home run.