The Avengers

I just want to preface this by saying that it's really exciting to be up at 3:30 in the morning writing a review for a movie that I just saw the midnight premiere of. Now, on to the regularly scheduled review.

It's now May, and that means one big thing for moviegoers: summer blockbuster season is upon us. And this year kicked off with a bang: The Avengers. Since Marvel created its own studio and debuted with Iron Man in 2008, their pet project was tying together all of their subsequent movies (The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger) into one climactic mega-film that will generate a lot of hype, a lot of excitement, and a lot of cash. Well, their efforts have finally come to fruition, and, for all of the legendary hype surrounding it, it did about as well as anyone could expect.

It's very hard to live up to the expectations that The Avengers was burdened with. All of the aforementioned movies (with maybe the exception of Iron Man 2) were greeted with both financial and critical acclaim, and so a movie featuring all of these iconic characters was bound to have a lot of pressure riding on it. Well, I feel that it fell a little short of the mark, but it didn't miss completely.

Let's start with the good: The Avengers does not short you on laughs or action. The movies leading up to The Avengers had a trademark wit to them that made them much more enjoyable than many of the droll, terrible Marvel films that preceded them (I'm looking right at you, Daredevil). The Avengers kicked it up a notch, though, and I found myself laughing a lot more than I expected to at a superhero movie. It's not a comedy by any means, but it has enough witty one-liners sprinkled throughout to keep you on your toes. If the comedic timing doesn't keep you on your toes, however, the action sequences certainly will. As the Marvel superhero movie to end all Marvel superhero movies, The Avengers does not skimp on fight scenes. Every  major character has his or her time to shine, and all of them rocked. As far as edge-of-your-seat action is concerned, this movie has some of the most spectacular and well-choreographed/animated sequences out there.

With the good highlighted, there must come the downsides of the movie. For starters, it's 2 hours and 23 minutes long, and the time isn't always put to good use. I would understand the long runtime if a lot of the time was spent developing characters past where we left them in the prequels. Instead, we get a little more development out of Captain America and Loki, and the rest is spent blowing things up and listening to Iron Man spout one-liners. While certainly entertaining, it grows old after a while, to the point of predictability. I was never expecting The Avengers to have an award-winning script, but I certainly wished that it had a little more originality to it.

Overall, The Avengers is certainly not a bad way to kick off a summer blockbuster season. With a few almost certainly terrible films on the horizon (i.e. Battleship, G.I. Joe: Retaliation), it's nice to start off with a movie that can be entertaining visually and not be an absolute pain to sit through. I give it 7 HULKSMASH's out of 10.