OK, first off, is it “The Avengers” or “Marvel’s The Avengers” or “The Avengers Assemble” or “Marvel’s The Avengers Assemble” or “Marvel’s The Avengers Sold Separately Some Assembly Required”? That’s been
buggin’ me for weeks now.
Wouldn’t it be great if you had a family Hulk? There’d be a gathering, a birthday party for an aunt or uncle, maybe. There would be food, cake and drink. And more drink. And then things would be said, but right before the point of no return, The Hulk would emerge, trash the place, and you’d talk for the next eight weeks about how The Hulk destroyed Aunt Farina’s birthday instead of the confession that Uncle Maynard is having an affair.
You know, it would be even funnier if Bruce Banner were a food snob. He’d start in on the crudités, then work his way to complaints over unchilled Chardonnay, finally busting out with, “This foie gras isn’t KOSHER! HULK SMASH!!”
Speaking of trashing the place, The Avengers showed up in America last week and went to town on box office records. In fact, there’s no point in me reviewing The Avengers – I don’t have to explain what this is, there aren’t any on the fence people among the entire lot of you, and most have already seen it anyway. But if you think that will stop me from writing something, this is probably your first trip to Frogville.
Does the title of this film sound defeatist to anybody else? I mean, there’s no point in avenging until you have something to avenge … and, of course, that idea goes hand-in-hand with the question of correct response. If not an extended family gathering, when is the best time to bring in a Hulk? I suppose the title is mildly better than The Preventists.
Avengers is what we’ve been building toward for years now. This is like the NBA All-Star Game in movie form. We saw Thor (Chris Hemsworth); we saw Captain America (Chris Evans); we saw Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) twice; we even saw Ang Lee (?) direct Hulk. Now they’re all together to fight evil with some not-so-new crazy pals like Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye 
(Jeremy Renner). No word yet on the whereabouts of Plastic Man (Jim Carrey)and Apache Chief (Denny Trejo).
The biggest problem with The Avengers is the bad guys. They needed to be bigger and badder, not just amorphous and generic. And what was the alien invasion plan here, anyway? Hmmmm, 7 billion people on planet earth … literally millions of those are heavily armed and trained to kill … a space portal opening roughly the size of a living room … I think we can take ‘em.” Disturbing, is it not, that a force scheduled to take down 7,000,000,000 had trouble with 6. Don’t sweat it; you’re only off by a factor of 12. Gotta hand it to the species who mastered space travel without a strong understanding of math. Norse God Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is the head, and only nameable, villain. We saw him bore Thor and more for two hours last season. Can’t say he does anything more for me now.
Joss Whedon has shown awesome touch with villains … what the heck happened here? In lieu of a 
legitimate anti-Earth threat, we get a lot of heroes battling one another. This is a quality move –now we get to see who is more badass: Iron Man or Thor, Thor v. Hulk (Mark Ruffalo in this version), Hawkeye v. Black Widow, Captain America v.(?) Nick Fury , Ecks v. Sever, The Human Hernia v. Gary from Accounting…it’s all good.
Unless you live or die for Scarlett Johansson’s ass, The Avengers is roughly 3 to 47 times more entertaining when Robert Downey is on screen as when he is not. I get the distinct impression Joss has been dying to animate Tony Stark for years. I’d love to say Avengers is a great film, and if you compare it to previous 
“blockbuster” attempts to usher in summer like Wolverine, Thor and Spider-Man 3, it was. I’ll leave it at that.
Rated PG-13, 143 Minutes
D: Joss Whedon
W: Joss Whedon, Zak Penn
Genre: Marketing
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Those who live for summer blockbusters.
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Merchant and/or Ivory
Oh, before I forget, yes, two separate Hulk moments late in the film are probably the funniest things I’ve seen all year.
The Steel Frog Blog review of Thor can be found here.
The Steel Frog Blog review of Captain America can be found here.
The Steel Frog Blog has yet to review Scarlett Johansson’s ass.
