I was disheartened to hear someone quip this morning that the new
Avengers Assemble was
The Avengers gets the Michael Bay/Transformers treatment because it has big, windy robots wrecking New York. Well the difference is Joss Whedon is clever and witty where as Michael Bay is a puerile jerk.
There's nothing wrong with massive automatons wreaking havoc in and of itself and indeed the scenes of robots where quite watchable. Bay's problem was that he managed to make something which should be cool by definition lame due to a complete lack of tack and taste and pathetic attempts at trying to be funny in the scenes between robot tussling that would leave John Walters embarrassed. It was as if he knocked down The Fonz in a Skoda and put him in a wheelchair.
If anything
Avengers Assemble is [/i]The Avengers [/i] gets the
Serenity treatment. It has that same style of wise-cracks and unexpected yet hilarious happenings. He well managed the hard task of having multiple protagonists without losing the grip of itself by simply keeping them within range of each other, sort of forced to live together like Big Brother contestants, without letting anyone wander off or get sidetracked. It helps they all had their own movie previous. Though you don't need to see any of them to get the gist as enough background is given without getting bogged down in details to let you know what's happening.
The action in the film never lets up from the beginning and it's amazing Whedon manages to never let it get tired as The Avengers go from one damn thing after another. It helps that it has a great cast and character interactions to break it all up. Just about every Avenger combo is used and the way they play off each other is great.
Like in
Thor Loki steals the show. Poor guy tries his best to be menacing, imperious and megalomaniacal only to have the piss taken out of him by a bunch of people who truly live on a different planet. One scene is worth the price of the admission alone. I'll spoiler it below and you can come back after you see it and tell me I'm right.
5/5
Don't click if you haven't seen (see above)
Libertarianism: The belief that out of all the terrible things governments can do, helping people is the absolute worst.