Good, Not Great

Rating: 7/10 (24 June 2012)

After hearing my family rave about how incredible, awesome, amazing, blah, blah, blah ... this movie was, my wife and I went to see it. We are HUGE Marvel fans, and we were excited to see the movie. Our expectations simply were not met relative to all the hype, and this film is not worthy of an 8.6 rating. It's a very good movie, but not great by any means. Here's the good and the bad.
The Good: The special effects were outstanding as you would expect. The acting was also nicely done. The script was somewhat well paced, although we both felt it started fairly slowly. The movie did had some of the funniest moments of any super hero film I've seen. The storyline was OK, but that brings me to the bad.
The Bad: The storyline was just OK. I won't spoil the movie, but suffice it to say the anti-heroes motivations were somewhat silly to me. That said, it follows (somewhat) to the comic storyline, so the plot was never really all that interesting to begin with. The actors and directors did the best they could with the plot, but I was never pulled into the story that deeply, nor did it strike any emotional connection or interest for me. It was just a great action movie that was well acted with a reasonable script.
Avengers is a very good action film, and worthy of seeing on the big screen. However, to see this film rated so close to the Dark Night is preposterous. Those films are in totally different leagues.