Gloriously entertaining, and extremely well-balanced across its large cast of characters

Rating: 10/10 (27 April 2012)

Avengers (all right, "Avengers Assemble" if you insist) is really quite extraordinarily good. It's pretty much everything that's fun about superhero comics translated directly onto the screen - I was hoping for as much from Joss Whedon and he delivered.
Like Serenity and the Buffy season 5 finale, it's extremely well-structured so that everyone gets more than one moment to shine in both dialogue and action scenes; I can't think of another action movie that has so many characters and is so well-balanced between them all, and all the different combinations of arguments and team-ups between them.
It's also extremely funny (but *mostly* not in that trademark Joss Whedon "Buffyspeak" way that some VERY WRONG people find "precious" and annoying). It has better Tony Stark dialogue than either Iron Man movie! Having said that, the funniest gags are visual ones that involve the Hulk...
I often complain that superhero films' weakest parts tend to be their climactic action sequences: the stakes are raised, and believability is strained. Well, for once we have a superhero film whose best action scene comes at the end. It's one of the best-sustained action finales since The Matrix - and much better-directed than the incomprehensible shots of The Dark Knight. It's constantly spectacular and contains countless satisfying moments in both action and dialogue - most of which also happen to be very funny.
But the best *single scene* in the whole film isn't an action scene! A standard phrase Joss Whedon has used in promotional interviews is "I wanted to figure out why all these different characters should even be in the same room as each other". Well, that scene where they *are* all in the same room as each other turned out to be the film's absolute highlight. Scenes like that are what I'll look forward to on subsequent viewings. There have been lots of action films that I've enjoyed at the cinema for their sheer spectacle but then have felt little desire to re-watch because that they didn't have much else going for them (Avatar comes to mind) - but this isn't one of them.
The film's plot isn't exactly intricate: it's extremely tightly focused around the MacGuffin from Thor and Captain America. However, this isn't a bad thing: in a film of this scale, ensuring the characterisation and action is satisfying is an ambitious balancing act as it is, without adding a complex twisty-turny plot to the mix as well.
The film doesn't carry any sort of larger real-world message; it's really just a movie about these specific characters - about guys in silly costumes beating the living daylights out of each other. But as far as movies about guys in silly costumes beating the living daylights out of each other go... well, it's hard to imagine how they could get much better.