The TransVengers

Rating: 7/10 (14 May 2012)

You've already seen the Avengers and that's OK.
You've seen it in every other Marvel movie yet released. You've definitely seen the finale, and even the McGuffin, because they took it straight from the first Transformers movie. The Avengers is great fun, but it's fading from memory faster than who won last season's American Idol.
While fans of Joss Whedon will likely be pleased, I think his victory with the Avengers is a double edged sword. He carefully corrals the thicket of big names here, but in the process we're stuck with a laundry list of cliché scenes, a very weak villain, dialog that exists purely to waste time and characters who rely far too much on their costume to get them through the movie.
One can't shake the feeling, no matter whose names appear as writers, the Avengers smacks of committee construction. Excluding Sam Jackson, most of what is here is by the numbers. There are precious few moments of humanity in a story that should be overflowing with it. In this respect, think this movie is a polar opposite of Ang Lee's HULK. A film that was painfully boring, but also full of human touches - it had a style that could have been robbed like a gold mine to add more character in the place of the dreadful and endless expository dialog exchanges before we're shuttled to the MIchael Bay Transformers action scenes we've seen a thousand times by this point.
But is it bad? Heck no. The Avengers is ultimately a good time if you can settle for less. There are no motivations for anything in the film other than to recycle everything that's already been done and play it safe to please an audience. Yes, you've seen the Avengers already, but that's OK.
B-