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100There are moments of genuine pathos, genuine humor, genuine surprise. As much as the film adheres to the strictures of the standard comic-book movie, it also pops with a knowing, loving, Whedon-world jokiness that keeps everything barreling along.
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100The Avengers is both campy and reverential. Comic-Con nerds will have multiple orgasms. I had a blast.
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100Most impressive of all, The Avengers makes superhero movies new again - a colossal task indeed.
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91Tasked with meeting the many requirements necessary for any Avengers movie to work, Whedon checks off all the boxes, then sets about creating new expectations for what a big superhero movie ought to be.
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90The real hero here is Joss Whedon, who directs the film with a fanboy's enthusiasm and a thorough knowledge of the genre.
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88The Avengers kicks ass.
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88The Avengers has it all. And then some. Six superheroes for the price of one ticket... It's also the blockbuster I saw in my head when I imagined a movie that brought together the idols of the Marvel world in one, shiny, stupendously exciting package. It's "Transformers" with a brain, a heart and working sense of humor. Suck on that, Michael Bay. [10 May 2012, p.74]
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83The Avengers is as brawny and lamebrainy as any comic book movie deserves to be, capped by a 40-minute assault pummeling senses as few action sequences ever have.
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83In terms of storytelling, The Avengers is for the most part a highly functional, banged-together vehicle that runs on synthetic franchise fuel. Yet the grand finale of CGI action, set in the streets of New York, is - in every sense - smashing.
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80This mania is what Marvel followers have hungered for, and it would be fruitless to deny their delight. As Loki says to a crowd of earthlings, "It is the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation." We do, Master, we do.
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80Whedon is the key reason why this $220-million behemoth of a movie is smartly thought out and executed with verve and precision. It may be overly long at two hours, 23 minutes, but so much is going on you might not even notice.
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80The action scenes-blissfully easy to follow-are where Whedon makes the giant leap into the big leagues.
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80The Avengers doesn't aim for transcendence, only for the juggler's skill of keeping the balls smoothly airborne, and in 3-D too (converted after production). At that it succeeds.
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80The Avengers have been assembled and, for the most part, they fit together superbly. A joyous blend of heroism and humour that raises the stakes even as it maintains a firm grip on what makes the individual heroes tick.
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80Big, brash and very funny, Joss Whedon's Avengers Assemble is equal to the sum of its parts – and for once, that's no faint praise. Suit up.
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80Whedon and his cohorts have managed to stir all the personalities and ingredients together so that the resulting dish, however familiar, is irresistibly tasty again.
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80Like a superior, state-of-the-art model built from reconstituted parts, Joss Whedon's buoyant, witty and robustly entertaining superhero smash-up is escapism of a sophisticated order.
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78Fans of all that has come before (excluding Roger Corman's premature-ejaculation version of "The Fantastic Four," natch) will weep tears of giddy joy at how crowd-pleasingly cohesive – and ridiculously fun – this film is.
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75The banter has zip, the effects are fun, the climactic battle is decently spectacular, and if the 3-D is mostly expendable, there are a few scenes where it adds a nice kick.
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75Even with the flaws of the final half, The Avengers is grand, brisk fun. It comes tantalizingly close to reaching the level of the very best comic book films of the current generation.
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75The film is good enough to keep all the Marvel Comics crazed audiences out there deliriously happy while keeping the rest of us earthbound types in moderate thralldom.
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75The Avengers has been executed with all the reverence the super-fans demand, as well as the winking, self-referential humor that has made it palatable for filmgoers disinclined to take a bunch of grown men dressed in spangles and spandex so very seriously.
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75Whedon has made a superb template of an action film.
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75Whedon weaves a story that allows each of the heroes to do what they do best. And while they may not have exactly equal time, audiences get enough of each to feel satisfied, but not sated. Clever work, indeed.
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75When I see these six together, I can't help thinking of the champions at the Westminster Dog Show. You have breeds that seem completely different from one another (Labradors, poodles, boxers, Dalmatians), and yet they're all champions.
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75You don't need to be a "comic-book person" to find the set pieces exhilarating. But if you are such a person, or a fan of the movies that comic books turn into, The Avengers feels like the moment you've been waiting for.
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75If the film is more solid and satisfying than terrific, so be it.
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75The Avengers is neither overwhelming nor underwhelming. What it expertly is, is whelming.
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70Because it pulls off the tricky feat of combining multiple pre-existing Marvel franchises into a reasonably entertaining and tonally coherent whole, The Avengers will likely be hailed as a kind of thinking fan's superhero film, the way Whedon's recent "Cabin in the Woods" functioned as both a horror movie and a critique of same.
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63The fiery finale is good enough to leave the legions smiling. But when a movie is expected to lift an entire industry, "good enough" shouldn't be good enough.
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63The chaos and carnage here is just a pumped-up take on a tradition that harks back to Godzilla, and harks back, of course, to the Marvel comics from which all these heros originally sprang.
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63While The Avengers exhibits exemplary craftsmanship, Joss Whedon hasn't made a great film.
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60They're fascinating characters, to be sure, with back stories ripe for development. But Whedon doesn't commit here, and the results are shrug-worthy.
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60The picture is broken down into narrative chunks that ultimately don't tell much of a story – what you get instead is a series of mini-climaxes held together by banter between characters.
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60It's fun to watch Whedon pitch his heroes against each other. Child's play, maybe, but entertaining all the same.
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60The bad news is that if you haven't seen "Thor," "Captain America" and "Iron Man 2" - that's six hours and three minutes of homework - The Avengers won't make sense. The good news is if you're a human under the age of 45, you probably already have.
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50Expected too is the result: a kind of sterile opulence or, if you prefer, a magnificent emptiness.
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May 1, 201250Every time the movie hints at something rich and evocative, Whedon undercuts it with a punchline - his instincts as a big-picture storyteller crippled by his short-term need to please the crowd.
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50The Avengers has a knockout final 30 minutes, all gee-whiz crash and bang and eye candy that makes grand use of 3D and IMAX and all the other toys. But the Transformers movies did that, too.
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40A slow start, a single star performance surrounded by indifferent acting and an onslaught of computer effects that range from seen-it-all-in-"Transformers" to a whole sky full of spectacular stuff in the midtown Manhattan climax.
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40The light, amusing bits cannot overcome the grinding, hectic emptiness, the bloated cynicism that is less a shortcoming of this particular film than a feature of the genre.
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40What I see in The Avengers, unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore.
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May 2, 201230Of the star-studded cast, only Mark Ruffalo (playing Bruce Banner) and Robert Downey Jr. (as Iron Man) bring any personality to the place-holder dialogue. Overlong, monotonous, violent, and simple-minded, this is like one of those "World's Biggest Gang Bang" videos, except that no one onscreen appears to be enjoying himself.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 459 out of 546
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Mixed: 48 out of 546
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Negative: 39 out of 546
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