The Avengers (movie review)
Spectacular. Unparalleled. Funny. Witty. Exciting. All these adjectives should be applied to the genius Joss Whedon, who does it again in spectacular fashion by creating the best superhero action movie I have seen in many years. And I have seen the movies that preceded The Avengers (including Captain America, Ironman 1 and 2, Thor and The Hulk). I found The Avengers extremely fast-paced, fun and while it did require you at some points to be a little bit of a comics geek, the storyline was coherent enough that even if I had attended the movie with someone who hadn’t seen any of the previous movies (I took JT with me and he has seen all the previous movies with me as well), they would have understood the storyline.
In case you didn’t know what The Avengers is, the story begins when a cube of sustainable energy (the Tesseract, which sounded like a Sazerac, and made me want to get a drink) is stolen from the hands of covert spy and military group S.H.I.E.L.D., commanded by Nick Fury. Fury, alongside his team (the lovable and dorky Clark Gregg in the role of Phil Coulson, Fury’s right hand, and Vancouver’s own Cobie Smulders as fearless and gorgeous Maria Hill, Fury’s Deputy Director), having lost the Tesseract to Asgaard’s Loki (the Cain to Thor’s Abel, spectacularly portrayed by Tom Hiddleston) work to assemble a superpowered team of heroes: The Avengers Project.
Enter Captain America (the most perfect Chris Evans), Thor (god-like Chris Hemsworth), Bruce Banner/The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo both geeky and action-hero-like), Ironman (amazingly portrayed again by Robert Downey Jr.) and the Black Widow (sexy and lethal Scarlett Johansson). One by one, Fury recruits them for an impossible mission: recover the Tesseract. Given that nobody really knows the real motives for Fury to assemble The Avengers, and the unlikelihood of their collaboration, Whedon makes a really good job of intertwining individual storylines without eclipsing any of the main characters and all the while enriching how each superhero comes of their own.
Obviously, I am not going to give you the ending but you should definitely go see it. You will leave the theatre excited and rejuvenated. And perhaps you will want to be a hero of your own.
Disclosure: I paid for my and JT’s tickets. I did not get media tickets for this performance and thus a review was neither expected nor implied. As always I retain full control over anything I publish on my site
