Fun, and great characters and dialog first and foremost

Rating: 10/10 (30 April 2015)

Any comic book movie - worth its salt far as budgets go - can give us terrific action with mind-blowing CGI and special effects. Marvel's The Avengers, the culmination of the work of five movies (one of them a sequel to the first, Iron Man), is stuffed with a good load of action and mayhem and a climax that bursts at the seams with aliens being torn apart by the heroes Captain America, Incredible Hulk, Thor and Tony Stark (plus relative newcomers Black Widow and Hawkeye, with Nick Fury and Agent Colson in the wings), and if you want to get your money shots, Joss Whedon doesn't skimp out. But the reason why he was chosen as the filmmaker here wasn't just for name cachet (though it probably helped).
What Whedon's done over much of his career in TV and other films and webseries (Buffy, Firefly, Dr. Horrible, Angel, etc) was excel at bringing groups of people together against fantastical, supernatural, other-worldly/alien forces, but making it always about stakes, humor, horror, drama and solid conflicts. Villains don't just act nasty, they have their own logic and reasons for doing what they do, and if they're not sympathetic they certainly are understandable as characters, full of the stuff that makes them great to watch, especially with the best dialog probably out of anyone (i.e. the Mayor on Buffy, for those that recall).
So here we get Loki, previously a villain in Thor (and later sort of brought back for Thor 2), and is by far the highlight of the film as Tom Hiddleston chews up scenery, but does it in a kind of elegant, theatrical, relishing way. By the time he spews out 'Muelling quim", you're on the edge of your seat. His performance, what he does with every moment of screen time, is much more exciting than any alien snake going through the sky. And yet his ego and petty-mindedness does him in, and Whedon has a lot of fun writing this character, making him a threat but someone who can be taken down under the circumstances.
This is one of the best of the Marvel films just by the way that Whedon goes about the sort of 'Ghostbusters/Ninja Turtles' formula - the four main players, each distinct, playing off one another, but things could turn on a dime any moment amid the jokes and this and that. Along with Hiddleston, Downey once again makes Tony Stark a helluva great character to take in as he is constantly thinking even as he is laying his sarcasm and deadpan on the other characters. And Johansson actually has a few really great scenes - Whedon has always written women characters as complex to the point that they put other "complex" male characters to shame - and somehow amid the many characters and plot turns going on, she stands out, especially Widow's scene with Loki. Ruffalo, too, does a lot with a little... until he gets to the "other guy".
I don't know if Avengers is great art, but it does what I want to see when I go to big giant behemoth-like spectacles: provide me a host of characters who have to work together, and gives them interesting, entertaining and believable things to say. At 142 minutes it goes by at a great pace as well - not too fast, not too slow, nothing drags here, and that counts as well. Along with the first Iron Man and the recent Marvel Netflix show Daredevil, this is the MCU at the top of their game.