Decent fun

Rating: 7/10 (19 November 2012)

Loki opens a portal to steal the tesseract right from under Fury's nose while converting two of Fury's sidekicks to his cause. He plans on opening a giant portal so that aliens can invade the earth and he can become the ruler over earthlings.
Fury starts the Avenger initiative. Get all heroes, superheroes, semiheroes together to save the planet- even though his council doesn't agree entirely. So we get the scenes of these guys being recruited for the mission- as usual for heroes, against their will. There's Iron Man and the Hulk and their normal selves, some Russian agent chick, Captain America, and even Thor shows up.
For more than an hour they fight amongst each other as is required of movie characters these days. But they do capture Loki in the process. Oddly he seems to want to be there. They realize he's up to something and the Russian chick is sent to find out what that is. It turns out to be rather underwhelming. Now Loki's people attack the flying aircraft carrier where everybody is. That forces these goofs to join forces and get serious.
Loki escapes, opens the portal, aliens attack NY, the avengers respond and have to find a way to close the portal. But Fury wasn't entirely honest with them. He's up to something.
Everything goes pretty much by the numbers. Loki is the star here by far. Of the heroes, Downey's character is the only somewhat memorable one. He manages to be a bit funny, cocky, but not too arrogant. Renner is pretty intense and interesting. Thor is likable. The other's don't do a whole lot. Jackson as always plays himself, or rather a caricature of himself. Why does he still get hired? The Avengers isn't as awesome as Thor nor as awful as Captain America. It's somewhere in between. Your standard summer blockbuster with serious CGI carnage a bit too reminiscent of some Transformers movie. We clearly don't need to see another movie with giant alien worms destroying skyscrapers, please. Whedon did his work and saved this from becoming some crappy Michael Bay clone. The script and dialog are alright. The whole idea just doesn't work all too well for me. All these ridiculous heroes-some human, others superhuman, others CGI, together. At least when it's all and said and done it's somewhat exhilarating but about 40 minutes too long. Intros are fine but we don't need that much of an intro let alone the obnoxious bickering amongst the main characters.