Movie Review: Marvel's The Avengers

Ever since the first Iron Man movie debuted back in 2008, we have been waiting with bated breath for Marvel’s The Avengers to assemble on the big screen. At last that moment has finally arrived, and boy it doesn’t disappoint.

Picking up where last year’s Thor and Captain America movies left off, Earth’s mightiest heroes find themselves having to team up to take on Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and the power of the Tesseract, the cosmic cube type object last seen in Captain America: The First Avenger. Loki has a new alien army at his disposal, then again - the heroes have a Hulk.

Marvel’s The Avengers takes the best aspects of the individual Marvel Avengers-based movies and improves upon them with the character interaction, action sequences and special effects. For instance, the Hulk looks even more realistic in Avengers than he did in the Hulk movie and many of the fight scenes look crisp, clean and realistic, no easy feat with the number of sequences using significant CGI.

The overall story, although not bad, is very comic book-like. In other words, we aren’t talking about groundbreaking material. What makes Avengers stand out so well is the character interaction between all the players, from Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Captain America (Chris Evans) to the minor ones like Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) and Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders). Even the CGI Hulk manages to shine and show some real personality in this movie. In fact some of the funniest scenes in the movie involve Hulk and Thor or Hulk and Loki.

I know not everyone will agree with me, but I honestly believe Avengers is the best super hero movie to date, even better than The Dark Knight Returns. Maybe Avengers doesn’t have one actor who gives quite as good a performance as Heath Ledger did as the Joker, but overall I think Avengers outshines them all.

If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you watch Iron Man, Thor, Incredible Hulk and Captain America: The First Avenger before going to see Marvel’s The Avengers. Those movies are very much a part of the overall story arc that this movie finishes, but be prepared to get your socks knocked off when watching Avengers...

Of course, be sure to stay through the end of the credits for a bonus scene although I expect only die-hard Marvel fans will know what they are seeing.

GRADE: A+

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