The Avengers review

From denofgeek, Whether you call it Avengers Assemble or The Avengers, one thing's certain: it’s the best Marvel superhero movie yet. James explains why in his spoiler-free review...

Well. Of all the things you can say about Avengers, it only takes one simple sentiment to do it justice: that was totally worth the wait.

Ever since a small but perfectly-formed teaser at the end of Iron Man heralded the coming of the Avengers, it’s been tough to keep expectations reasonable. For every good Marvel film, there was a bad one. For every reason to get excited, there was a reason to be cautious. A complete disaster seemed unlikely, but anything less than genre-defining brilliance was going to be a let-down.

And to Whedon’s credit, he pulled it off. He didn’t just make the best superhero action film that has ever been made, he somehow did it while making a Joss Whedon film – smart, funny and dramatic, but with all the trappings of a sci-fi action movie presented fully intact. Imagine if Transformers 3 had a plot, a script, actors you liked and comprehensible special effects: that’s what Avengers feels like. It’s all so very… big.

Of course, with seven lead characters, a villain backed by an army and a supporting cast pulled from multiple sources, it could never be anything but. Perhaps the hardest challenge Avengers faced was in maintaining its sense of scale: giving the street-level skills of characters like Captain America, Black Widow and Hawkeye’s a place where they could shine even against the larger-than-life exploits of Iron Man, Thor and The Hulk. And yet, somehow, everyone gets their moment. Most get four or five.

To quote Den of Geek’s own Mike Leader, Avengers was far better than it needed to be. The action beats are there. The character beats are there. But there’s so much more than that too. Whedon knows what the audience expects of an action film in this genre, and he uses that knowledge to pull the rug from under us again and again – sometimes for a joke, sometimes as a plot twist, but also without it ever getting old. It even looks fantastic, proving Whedon as not just a distinguished writer, but a distinguished action director. There’s no question that from now on, he’s going to be Hollywood A-list.

Full review here