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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
A Marvel-ous comic book opus
Avengers is an action-packed ensemble of super-heroes. And it's pretty funny, too
Supersize them superheroes: From left, Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), and Hulk (Mark Ruffalo).
Movie review
The Avengers
- Starring Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson
- Grant Park, Kildonan Place, Polo Park, Polo Park IMAX, St. Vital, Towne
- PG
- 142 minutes
- 4 stars out of five
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Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (POSTMEDIA)
About this time last year, we witnessed Transformers Dark of the Moon, a blockbuster that would be the second highest-grossing film of 2011. It delivered impressive digital vistas of destruction, but it was still a dispiritingly stupid movie in the dismal template of director Michael Bay, with lots of flag-waving and horrible humour thrown in to leaven the clanking cacophony of battling robots.
Truth be told, the highly anticipated multi-comic book franchise The Avengers actually seems to borrow a few key plot points from Transformers 3 regarding an alien-invasion-via-space-portal.
But we'll let that pass. For one thing, the plot of The Avengers was set in motion in 2011 with the movies Thor (The Avengers' villain is Thor's brother Loki) and Captain America (The Avengers' MacGuffin is the Tesseract, an energy cube disc the Cap had to pry from Nazi über-villain The Red Skull.)
But more importantly, The Avengers works. Unlike Bay, screenwriter-director Joss Whedon actually has a sense of humour, and the movie is elegantly punctuated with knee-slapping moments, whether a deft one liner from Robert Downey's cynical Tony Stark/Iron Man or a hilarious bit of comic book slapstick courtesy of The Hulk.
Whedon actually pulls off an impressive orchestration here, assembling the heroes of no less than four existing Marvel franchises and putting together a comic book symphony, allowing each character their theme, but layering them all together in a satisfying comic book opus.
On screen, the guy who puts the band together is Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), an eye-patched spymaster in charge of the "Avengers Initiative," a secret strategy of pooling the resources of extraordinary superheroes in the event of emergency.
That emergency arrives in the person of Loki (Tom Hiddleston), a trickster demi-god from Thor's mythical realm of Asgard. He steals the Tesseract from Fury's top-secret facility, and threatens to employ it to transport an alien army from across the universe. Fury enlists Tony Stark and Hulk alter-ego Dr. Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo, taking over the role from Edward Norton) to use their scientific acumen to track the cube while unleashing the recently thawed Second World War hero Captain America (Chris Evans) and his super-soldier abilities to harness Loki.
Employing the kinky reasoning that all superhero movies benefit from a woman in form-fitting leather, Whedon gives us two: Scarlett Johansson's feline superspy Black Widow and Cobie Smulders' can-do Agent Maria Hill. Smulders provides a sexier counterpoint to Clark Gregg's droll Agent Coulson, whose participation in all the franchise entries comes to a kind of fruition here.
Where some filmmakers, like Bay and The Green Lantern's Martin Campbell don't seem to understand the comic book genre, Whedon gets it. He stages individual battles (Thor vs. Iron Man) with an admirable understanding of comic book dynamics, but he gives each character the benefit of a distinctive human personality, be it Tony Stark's arrogance or Bruce Banner's rage issues.
Whedon does spectacle really well too, staging a sustained battle finale with great flair. Like Bay movies, the action is fast and furious, but unlike Bay movies, you can actually understand what's going on.
And what's going on here? Only the best comic book movie since The Dark Knight.
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 4, 2012 D1
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'It's a beautiful story': There's not always a tomorrow to say you're sorry or make things right
10:04 AM 0
About Randall King
In a way, Randall King was born into the entertainment beat.
His dad was Winnipeg musician Jimmy King, a one-time columnist for the Winnipeg Free Press. One of his brothers is a playwright. Another is a singer-songwriter.
Randall has been content to cover the entertainment beat in one capacity or another since 1990.
His beat is film, and the job has placed him in the same room as diverse talents, from Martin Scorsese to Martin Short, from Julie Christie to Julia Styles. He has met three James Bonds (four if you count Woody Allen), and director Russ Meyer once told him: "I like your style."
He really likes his job.
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