Stay at home and watch Daredevil instead

Rating: 1/10 (7 May 2015)

We open with a battle in a forest and a castle. The action in the forest is similar to a scene in one of the early Star Wars films. The combination of live action characters, CGI and what may or may not be partially real locations looks like a very well rendered video game. In other words it looks fake and for me has the immediate effect of taking me out of the action. The CGI throughout the film is often very clunky. The mania for 3D is dying down now but it's about time that overuse of CGI went the same way. There's nothing wrong with CGI per se but when a film relies so extensively on it, you can't help but notice it.
The film is nearly two and a half hours in length, though it feels a lot longer. It would have been a much better, tighter film at ninety minutes. Basically you get overlong pieces of exposition followed by some sub-Transformers crash, bang, blow stuff up scenes – again and again and again and again. The one liners that frequent this film are a Joss Whedon trademark but the rest of the dialogue seldom rises above the jokes. The plot is barely comprehensible and certainly makes little sense.
It gives me no pleasure to criticise Whedon's work and I can't help but wonder how much of this film is really what he wanted to see on screen and how much of it was mandated by the studio. He's a big earner now but this is miles away from the excellent work he has done in the past. I can only hope he returns to more creative projects sometime in the near future. The work being done on the new Daredevil series by some of his former collaborators such as Doug Petrie and Drew Goddard shows how you can do justice to a Marvel superhero without compromising your principles.