Review - The Avengers

Rating: 9/10 (1 July 2012)

I saw The Avengers on May 17. Personally, I'm not much of a superhero fan, but I quite enjoyed the movie. In my opinion, The Avengers is a pretty good and entertaining movie, and it's a good theatrical experience. James Berardinelli wrote in his review, "The Avengers kicks ass." I agree.
Over the last few years, five movies have been made - Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and Captain America - which have built up to, and became prequels to, The Avengers. There were even things in those movies that hinted at them all being connected, and now this movie confirms it. The Avengers are all assembled in this film: Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk, the Black Widow, and Hawkeye. Yes, they're all played by the same actors, and they have the backgrounds that have been established for most of them in the "prequels" mentioned above. The villain in the movie is Loki, who was the villain in Thor, and who now plans on using the Tesseract, a powerful energy cube, to open a portal to another part of the universe and attack the earth with a powerful army. The Avengers are called together by Nick Fury, who runs an agency called S. H. I. E. L. D., and they must stop Loki from carrying out his plans. There's more to the story, but I won't give any more away.
I'm sure there are things that can be criticized about the movie. However, it's really not worth it, given there are so many good things about the movie, and the entire experience is very enjoyable, so I'm not going to bother with an in-depth review/criticism. In a way, the film is sort of critic-proof (for lack of a better term). So here's my advice: don't dissect or overly analyze the movie. Just sit back and enjoy it. That's not to say that it's a total Transformers-like junk movie or anything. It's actually halfway decent.
The actors put on a good performance and really bring out their characters, and the interactions between the characters are good - the gathering of the different superheroes is handled pretty well. The story is pretty solid, and it's coherent and appropriately paced. The visual and special effects and action scenes are great. Alan Silvestri composed an effective score for the movie. Overall, the movie is halfway decent, it's smart, and it's entertaining, and, unlike many junk films like Michael Bay's, it actually allows for sufficient blockbuster emotional involvement, and it has a good, wise balance between story and action/effects. The two-and-a-half hour running length of the movie pretty much zipped by for me. So, while I don't think this movie is great, it's definitely entertaining and worth seeing, and it's a very good theater experience.
My Rating: ***1/2 (out of ****)