If all genres eventually end in satire, then The Avengers is the logical evolution of the superhero genre, and Joss Whedon is the perfect person to helm a superhero movie. I wasn't sure if Whedon could make the transition from Dollhouse, which for all its brilliance often felt like it was filmed in someone's basement in the Valley, to a $200 million blockbuster.
The answer is that he definitely can. Points for the additional degree of difficulty afforded by having to write around incredibly boring characters like Captain America (Chris Evans), whose main weapons are a shield with a bullseye painted on it and a deadly earnestness; Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who wears phylacteries and shoots arrows at things that don't seem to be bothered by guns; and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who talks like Yoda and wields a weapon that looks like something you'd play whack-a-mole with.
The Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) shows up tied to a chair in her underwear, and in a charming set piece, um, answers the phone–to say any more would spoil it–and really sets the tone for the movie. For the rest of the show, Johansson does her best to act out from under a harrowing dye job and a character who doesn't actually have any super powers at all, although she is super-sexy. Her specialty is allowing men to think she's weaker than she is and using their assumptions to her advantage.
It only takes one thing to make up for all of this: Tony Stark, aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) We meet Tony in the penthouse of the Stark building, bantering with Gwyneth Paltrow's Pepper Potts, and the two of them ignite the movie, like a modern Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
In fact, it's a tribute to Whedon's writing skill, and Downey's acting, that the movie doesn't collapse like the Golden Gate Bridge in a disaster movie when Paltrow and her cutoff shorts get into the elevator and leave the building. For that, we have Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to thank, since he gives Stark somebody to talk scientific twaddle with, and somebody to needle.
Here's the plot: there's a glowing blue energy cube, and whoever controls it controls the world, and...oh, really, nobody gives a rat's ass. It's all just an excuse for the heroes to quarrel with each other, and then eventually team up against supervillain Loki (Tom Hiddleston, having almost as much fun as Downey). There might be a hidden message here about whether the superheroes are causing more damage than they cure, or whether the good guys are actually using the superheroes to help them build evil weapons, but if there is, the audience is pretty much guaranteed not to get it, because they'll be too busy laughing at Stark's nicknames for his fellow Avengers (Hawkeye the archer is "Legolas"; long-haired Thor is "Point Break"...you get the picture).
When the action scenes start, though, Downey has trouble projecting his mojo through the red and yellow suit, and Whedon's writing feels trapped in there with him. The heroes yell stupidities at each other, get thrown into a bus from a mile away, and arise breathing hard and lightly covered with dust. What finally saves these sequences is the animated Hulk; the incarnation of the character looks a little like Claymation, but the movement is so filled with life that it doesn't really matter. The Hulk is, in a word, hysterical.
Is it the best superhero movie ever? I don't know. It's certainly the best one that doesn't take itself seriously. And since comic books themselves often don't take themselves seriously–Spiderman is all about corny puns, isn't he?–that's probably okay. There's a little hint of backstory between Black Widow and Hawkeye that makes a perfunctory effort at drama, but overall it doesn't really aspire to more. Which is a shame, because usually Whedon does aspire to that. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse, especially, had juicy layers of serious right underneath the crispy strudel of one-liners. Maybe now that he's proven his box office abilities, in his next movie Whedon will be able to give us, along with his trademark wit, the depth of, say, Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight.
