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| The gang wonders why Spider Man isn't in The Avengers. |
* * * The Avengers. Written by Joss Whedon & Zak Penn.
Directed by Joss Whedon.
Fanboy Christmas has come early this year, as
Joss Whedon’s The Avengers arrives
bearing two tons o’ fun and a titanic $200 million gross in its first weekend.
If you recall, this is the movie its studio has been building up since forever,
as Avengers honcho Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has been making cameos in
other movies (Iron Man, Thor, Captain America) to recruit superheroes for his All-Star team. Forgetting
living torches and X-ray vision: living up to this kind of monstrous
anticipation is a pretty neat trick.
Nobody cares what critics say about these kinds of
blockbusting crowd-pleasers. For what it’s worth, this writer enjoyed Avengers about as much as anything from
the summer silly season can be enjoyed. Writer-director Whedon, the mind behind
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the ΓΌber
cool Firefly, deserves all the credit
for pulling off an interesting challenge: in one script, to give half a
dozen characters, leads in tent-pole movies of their own, their own
back-stories and their own special “moments”, stir up some conflict between
them, then pull it all together into a coherent, compelling whole. Where most
comic book movies are swan dives into a pool of shallow expectations, Whedon pulls off a quadruple somersault with reverse
twist into a pool of shallow expectations.
To be sure, some of these heroes—especially Thor (Chris
Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans)—are still clunky customers. With
his particular flair for combining humor with action, Whedon actually makes
these guys more likeable than in their “solo” movies. Avengers passes the most important test for an ensemble story: it adds
up to more than the sum of its parts.
It ain’t perfect, though. The biggest problem is the lack
of a truly compelling villain. In the original Thor, the hammer guy’s lesser-achieving brother Loki (Tom
Hiddleston) was a passably cunning, fey foil to Hemsworth’s brawn. Here, Whedon
can’t figure out whether to make Loki scary-crazy, or just a diva in platform
shoes throwing a cosmic tantrum. Hiddleston ends up trying to be both, and
therefore neither. Forget the hype: a villain as riveting as, say, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight would have turned a good romp into a great one.
Fortunately, the whole reason for assembling The Avengers is not really to defeat the
bad guy, but to see them enact hypothetical match-ups fan-boys have posed at school
bus stops for generations. Could Captain America stand up to Iron Man? Can the
Hulk smack down Thor? Whedon delivers the goods there, and not just in terms of
action: it doesn’t get much better than when Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.)
cuts the blond, stilted Thor down to size by calling him “Point Break”.
Much as there is to like about The Avengers, it has one troubling implication. In the ultimate battle over Manhattan, when the heroes take on Loki’s trans-dimensional army of goons of jet-skis, our conventional avengers—you know, the Army, Air Force, Marines and Navy—barely show up. Indeed, it’s striking how nobody other than the superheroes do much more than passively observe. So here it is, in comic-book microcosm: we envision military conflict in modern America as something we view from a distance, as others do the actual fighting. Unlike the big wars of the twentieth century, which were won by ordinary mortals doing extraordinary things, now we depend on the fewer than 1% of Americans who volunteer for service. The downside of superheroes, caped or in camo, is that they give the rest of us the luxury to be super-spuds.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
I'm not into super hero movies, but I might give this one a whirl, thanks Nick. Your movie reviews are cool.
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