Would it be too insulting to put comic book sound effects here?

Rating: 5/10 (22 June 2012)

The MacGuffin has been stolen in a darkly-lit and confusing sequence, and now the military-industrial complex has to rally its choice second-tier intellectual properties to its defence. All of those guys from the past two years of Marvel movies, plus a chick, a black guy, and Hawkeye to meet quotas, must team up to defeat the evil plot of Loki, whose main superpower is getting his ass kicked in every scene, and a bunch of unseen aliens who want to take over Earth or maybe destroy it because, well, that's what aliens do. They squabble for a bit, and never really resolve the argument, but it's okay because a bit character dies, mentions in his last breath that his death will bring the team together, and then the team states several times that his death brought them together, in case you didn't get that. And then they fight robot space manatees.
It's kind of hard to evaluate The Avengers as a film because, well, it doesn't really try to be a film. The plot is thin and generic, the characters were mostly established in previous films and don't gain any new development here, there's absolutely no attempt to create interesting images or anything more aesthetically pleasing than a forest of CGI, and it's not even internally consistent.
Instead The Avengers is a series of cool moments strung together, and some of the moments are indeed pretty cool, although a lot of the one-liners fall flat. This is probably why it's been received so rapturously by the Internet crowd, which mainly judges media based off the number of clever animated gifs they can spawn. And it is frequently fun, mainly whenever Robert Downey Jr. and/or the Hulk is on screen. But the first hour is unbearable, and all the banter and big speeches in the world can't make up for the corporate hollowness at the centre of the movie. In the end, fanboyism is just another kind of consumerism.