Movie Review: The Avengers
Review by Total Film
What do you get if you cross a Norse god-king with an ego the size of a planet, a nervy science boffin with gigantic anger issues, a WW2 super-soldier with a very silly costume and a genius billionaire playboy with flying armour? Arguments, obviously.
With great power comes great banter in writer/director Joss Whedon’s blockbuster multiplier, which isn’t the best superhero movie ever – but might well be the funniest.
Avengers Assemble is a power-play that’s unprecedented in Hollywood history: launching three different $100m franchises (four if you count the 2008 reboot) to construct one super-mega-franchise. And it has to be said, handing it to a 47-year-old fanboy whose single previous feature film (Serenity) couldn’t even scrape back its budget at the worldwide box office was a massive dice-roll.
Review by The Hollywood Reporter
The All-Star Game of modern superhero extravaganzas, The Avengers is humongous — the film Marvel and its legions of fans have been waiting for. It’s hard to imagine that anyone with an appetite for the trademark’s patented brand of fantasy, effects, mayhem and strangely dressed he-men will be disappointed; not only does this eye-popping 3D display of visual effects fireworks feature an enormously high proportion of action scenes, but director Joss Whedon has adroitly balanced the celebrity circus to give every single one of the superstar characters his or her due. Worldwide box-office returns will be, in a word, Marvelous.
During the past several years, Marvel has, with accelerated speed, expanded its cinematic repertoire of over-muscled, generally double-identitied heroes not otherwise encumbered by exclusive contracts with other studios — most notably The Hulk, Iron Man, Thor and Captain America — to arrive at the point where this summit meeting of superhuman good guys could be assembled.
Review by The Guardian
When the playground scuffle over whose turn it was to play Captain America started, you can picture the young Joss Whedon arriving with a homemade shield. A Marvel fan since childhood, the writer-director’s confident take on the Avengers series carries the mark of a piece of expensively assembled fan fiction, albeit stitched together with a lightness and wit that will just about carry the casual viewer through two-and-a-half-hours of comic geek nirvana.
That said, those unfamiliar with the Avengers universe should ride out the opening act with a glossary to hand. The nefarious demigod Loki (Tom Hiddleston) has teamed up with alien race the Chitauri and stolen the Tesseract – a powerful energy source that could potentially destroy the world. In response Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson), director of shady government agency SHIELD calls on Iron Man, Thor, the Incredible Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye and Captain America to whack the god of mischief into submission.
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