Crash! Bang! Pow! with substance
By Christy Lemire |
April 27, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
THE hype has been building for years and it couldn't possibly be more deafening at this point.
After a series of summer blockbusters that individually introduced Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor and Captain America, all these characters come together alongside several other friends and foes in Marvel's "The Avengers."
And with director and co-writer Joss Whedon, they couldn't be in better hands. He's pulled off the tricky feat of juggling a large ensemble cast and giving everyone a chance to shine, of balancing splashy set pieces with substantive ideology. Stuff gets blown up in beautifully detailed 3D in "The Avengers" - the area in and around New York's Grand Central Terminal gets obliterated beyond recognition - but the film is never a mess from a narrative perspective.
Whedon keeps a tight rein on potentially unwieldy material, and the result is a film that should please purists (of which he is one) as well as those who aren't necessarily comic-book aficionados. He also stays true to the characters while establishing a tone that's very much his own.
As he did with the recent horror hit "The Cabin in the Woods," which he co-wrote and produced, Whedon has come up with a script that's cheeky and breezy, full of witty banter and sly pop-culture shout-outs as well as self-referential humor, one that moves with an infectious energy that (almost) makes you lose track of its two-and-a-half-hour running time.
The back-and-forth between Robert Downey Jr's glib Iron Man and Chris Evans' old-school Captain America is electric, while Downey's more low-key, philosophical exchanges with Mark Ruffalo's Hulk help give the film some intellectual heft. Actually, Downey damn near runs away with this whole thing, a tough feat to pull off in a cast full of personalities literally larger than life.
But the film's vibe is never smug or off-putting; these are still comic book heroes full of all the torment and introspection you'd expect. And for a movie that's violent as hell, "The Avengers" ends up being an earnest plea for peace. It's a reminder that a summer blockbuster can be glossy and entertaining but still have meatier matters on its mind.
And we haven't even got to the plot yet: It's your basic bad-guy-wants-to-take-over-the-world kinda thing. But Whedon recognizes what a hackneyed premise that is, so has fun with it.
The preening, effete Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the bitter brother of hunky demigod Thor (Chris Hemsworth), descends to Earth from Asgard. Once here, he steals the Tesseract, the cosmic blue cube that gives its bearer unlimited power, or some such.
The no-nonsense Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. - which had been entrusted with the safety of said cube - springs into action to reacquire it by assembling a dream team of superheroes and other sundry bad-asses with specialized skills, including master assassin Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and super spy Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson).
The dialogue sparkles as brightly as the special effects; these people may be wearing ridiculous costumes but they're well fleshed-out underneath. And so in every regard, this movie truly fulfills its hype.
After a series of summer blockbusters that individually introduced Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Thor and Captain America, all these characters come together alongside several other friends and foes in Marvel's "The Avengers."
And with director and co-writer Joss Whedon, they couldn't be in better hands. He's pulled off the tricky feat of juggling a large ensemble cast and giving everyone a chance to shine, of balancing splashy set pieces with substantive ideology. Stuff gets blown up in beautifully detailed 3D in "The Avengers" - the area in and around New York's Grand Central Terminal gets obliterated beyond recognition - but the film is never a mess from a narrative perspective.
Whedon keeps a tight rein on potentially unwieldy material, and the result is a film that should please purists (of which he is one) as well as those who aren't necessarily comic-book aficionados. He also stays true to the characters while establishing a tone that's very much his own.
As he did with the recent horror hit "The Cabin in the Woods," which he co-wrote and produced, Whedon has come up with a script that's cheeky and breezy, full of witty banter and sly pop-culture shout-outs as well as self-referential humor, one that moves with an infectious energy that (almost) makes you lose track of its two-and-a-half-hour running time.
The back-and-forth between Robert Downey Jr's glib Iron Man and Chris Evans' old-school Captain America is electric, while Downey's more low-key, philosophical exchanges with Mark Ruffalo's Hulk help give the film some intellectual heft. Actually, Downey damn near runs away with this whole thing, a tough feat to pull off in a cast full of personalities literally larger than life.
But the film's vibe is never smug or off-putting; these are still comic book heroes full of all the torment and introspection you'd expect. And for a movie that's violent as hell, "The Avengers" ends up being an earnest plea for peace. It's a reminder that a summer blockbuster can be glossy and entertaining but still have meatier matters on its mind.
And we haven't even got to the plot yet: It's your basic bad-guy-wants-to-take-over-the-world kinda thing. But Whedon recognizes what a hackneyed premise that is, so has fun with it.
The preening, effete Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the bitter brother of hunky demigod Thor (Chris Hemsworth), descends to Earth from Asgard. Once here, he steals the Tesseract, the cosmic blue cube that gives its bearer unlimited power, or some such.
The no-nonsense Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the head of S.H.I.E.L.D. - which had been entrusted with the safety of said cube - springs into action to reacquire it by assembling a dream team of superheroes and other sundry bad-asses with specialized skills, including master assassin Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and super spy Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson).
The dialogue sparkles as brightly as the special effects; these people may be wearing ridiculous costumes but they're well fleshed-out underneath. And so in every regard, this movie truly fulfills its hype.
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