Review of The Avengers (2012) by Thecriticator — 04 May 2012

It accomplishes what a typical summer action film does: action. I can't really complain about this film because action is what I expected over story. But if there's one thing I'm just tired of at this point it's this: aliens. Aliens, aliens, aliens. I just think it's just so cliche that this is the plot point that we've been buttered up for after all these years with disappointing films like Iron Man 2 and Captain America. They should have just made this film from the beginning. The climatic battle felt more like Transformers 3. The whole premise felt like a Transformers movie. I mean, we have the Tesseract, a small cube-like thing that has energy to open portals and/or is a beacon of immense energy (sound familiar?), that's not very explained in the movie, or why the alien dudes want it. Albeit that moving action shot where it got all the Avengers doing their thing beating **** up simultaneously was great. And there's the gags like Hulk not being able to pick up Thor's hammer, Thor telling everyone Loki was adopted, the shield employee playing games when he's supposed to be working, etc. But Agent Coulson's scenes were by far the best. It was really petty of Nick Fury to use him to guilt the Avengers to work together while shying away from the fact that he was planning on building weapons of mass destruction out of the Tasseract.

But then we had the long, LONG attack on S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters where nothing was at stake. Loki got himself caught for reasons and nothing seemed to materialize from that. The Avengers all **** at each other as to how to handle the situation and then suddenly liking each other once some **** goes down. The Hulk acting like a lumbering ape, dragging his knuckles, who thought that would be a good idea? And finally setting up the Tasseract at Stark Tower to open a portal for the Decepticons to invade Earth. Something like that hasn't happened in a film recently, right? But again this movie was about gags and action and fanservice, so I cannot really complain about it. I got what I expected and it filled some time up in my night.