A comic book fan's orgasmic dream come true!

Rating: 10/10 (5 May 2012)

'THE AVENGERS': Five Stars (Out of Five)
Joss Whedon directed and co-wrote (with Zak Penn) this long awaited film adaptation of the Marvel comic book. Marvel Studios has been building a story arc to this film through five other individual comic book superhero movies (2008's 'IRON MAN' and 'THE INCREDIBLE HULK', 2010's 'IRON MAN 2' and 2011's 'THOR' and 'CAPTAIN America'). They brought on Whedon (who many comic book and film fans worship) to co-write and direct the film and being a true comic book fan himself he knew exactly what the fans wanted to see. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Stellan Skarsgard, Gwyneth Paltrow and Paul Bettany all reprise their roles from other Marvel comics movies and Mark Ruffalo was brought in to replace Edward Norton as 'The Hulk'. The movie is a comic book fan's orgasmic dream come true, all other film fans and audiences should be more than pleased as well though.
The story of 'The Avengers' revolves around the world peace keeping agency known as S.H.I.E.L.D.. Nick Fury (Jackson once again) is the director of the agency and has spent the last five Marvel movies recruiting superheroes for a special team known as the Avengers. When Loki (Hiddleston again), brother of Thor, invades the planet and steals the Tesseract, which he uses to control the minds of multiple S.H.I.E.L.D. agents including Hawkeye (Renner again), it's finally time for Fury to call on the Avengers to assemble and save the world. Loki wants to use the Tesseract to enslave the planet unless Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk and the others can stop him. The heroes must work through their own inner demons and conflicts with each other before they can work as a team and find the strength they need to stop Loki and his army.
I was expecting something much more campy and mainstream fun but Whedon takes the material very seriously and actually structured a really well written story which develops all of the key characters pretty evenly (with the exception of Hawkeye). Most comic movies kind of cheat their fans by trying more to appeal to the masses whereas this film makes the comic book audience it's target audience (as it should). It doesn't do so to the extent of losing the interest of everyone else though. For me I much more enjoyed 'THE DARK KNIGHT', 'SPIDER MAN 2' or 'X2' as far as comic book films go but I can really appreciate this film. It doesn't give me as big a boner as a lot of my comic book friends but it's definitely a crowd pleasing action film and one of the best of it's kind. I don't know as much about the source material as comic book nerds but I know a good movie and this is one. Whedon was definitely the right man for the job!
Watch our movie review show 'MOVIE TALK' at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNk88XWi4A4