The Avengers
Going in, the vigor of praise for The Avengers surprised me. The premise was troubling because it encompassed the age old Hollywood problem of having too many stars and personalities to really have a detailed story (even for a summer extravaganza) and the word is that the film was wonderfully charming and above the pay grade of the usual super hero affair. The assumption on my mind is the ingredient of Joss Whedon directing and writing (including completely rewriting an original script) is what made the film so much better.
Sadly, the movie is pretty bad. No need to fully review the bland. The story is a continuing trade off of one liners between characters mixed in with generic action. The third ingredient of self evaluating speech making is thrown in for dramatic touch, but the more I watched the movie, the more I noticed the wheels of plot turn hoping to entertain on every airy summer movie level. Problem is the frequency of good jokes was once a half hour (standard for bad sitcoms) and the story is almost non-existent.
Don’t know why this movie is garnering the praise and money. General rule of thumb is that every sequel adds more bad guys to further diminish appeal in essential super hero story. Only one bad guy in The Avengers, but does not seem very novel to replace multiple bad guys with just multiple good guys and think the likely problem will just go away. It definitely did not here. Even the easy likability of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark has seen better days of comic timing and one liners.
Film Splatter 