The Avengers
Three and a half stars (out of four)
Rated: PG
Agent Phil Coulson will love The Avengers.
You surely will, too, if you recognize his name. Officious but lovable S.H.I.E.L.D. sleuth Phil is one of many Marvel Comics minions Joss Whedon summons to his energizing superhero adventure, making this first blockbuster of summer 2012 something of a geek drill.
It helps if you go to the film having already seen the two Iron Man movies, plus Thor, The Incredible Hulk and Captain America: The First Avenger, all released between 2008 and 2011 and leading up to this ensemble nerdgasm.
But you don’t have to sport a propeller beanie to enjoy The Avengers, and this may be the highest possible praise for what director Whedon and his co-writer Zak Penn have wrought.
They’ve cannily crafted a saga guaranteed to pass muster with the Comic-Con cognoscenti, without forsaking regular popcorn munchers who just hope to see the planet get saved with maximum firepower and a few laughs.
Whether you love or merely like The Avengers, it will likely all come down to the performances and not the perfunctory plot or the on-the-fly back story.
You don’t need to know Agent Phil’s connection to the Marvel multiverse to appreciate Clark Gregg’s expanded and surprisingly emotive take on him here, as a combination of fusspot and fanboy.
And past knowledge of two iffy Hulk movies isn’t required to marvel at the nuances that newcomer Mark Ruffalo brings to the green-skinned beast, even though “the other guy” within mild-mannered Dr. Bruce Banner isn’t revealed until the 80-minute mark of this 140-minute bladder test.
Also new to the team and the evolving Avengers narrative are Scarlett Johansson as Natasha Romanoff, aka Black Widow, a lethal gymnast who demonstrates early on that a chair makes a dandy weapon, and Jeremy Renner as special agent Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, whose arrows aren’t quite the Robin Hood anachronism they appear to be.
Robert Downey Jr. returns in fine scathing form as billionaire playboy Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, the ferrous phenomenon who shields everything except his sharp tongue.
It’s pretty much business as usual, meanwhile, for the two most dislocated Avengers: Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, a Norse god fallen from the heavens; and Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, a Second World War super soldier still shaking off decades of deep freeze and culture shock.
They’ve all been brought together by eye-patched persuader Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the director of S.H.I.E.L.D., a global version of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “It’s sort of a team,” Stark glibly says of the Avengers, and “sort of” is the operative phrase for much of the movie.
Despite the imminent enslavement (or worse) of Earth threatened by Thor’s angry adoptive brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), who is in cahoots with a reptilian alien race called Chitauri (twirl those propellers!), our putative protectors can’t seem to get past their petty peeves.
This leads to some interesting and exhilarating matchups, as when Iron Man and Thor go head-to-head (literally) in testing their mettle, or when Romanoff and Banner teasingly hint at a black-on-green tangle that doesn’t involve their super alter-egos.
And speaking of tangles, are Tony Stark and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) finally going to get past their master/slave foreplay to reach someplace sexier?
But it’s not until the last half hour of the picture, when all are enjoined for a battle that could easily be called Transformers Take Manhattan, that Whedon’s carefully developed characters really take flight as a team.
And it’s quite the payoff, although it would be better if the villain were as good as the heroes. Hiddleston’s Loki could draw hisses at a Christmas pageant but he’s not terribly convincing as a planet-threatening psycho, especially when he dons his horned headdress and waves a blade Stark mocks as “the Glow Stick of Destiny.”
Indeed, when was the last time you heard a super villain being told, “You lack conviction,” as Loki is here by the ever-succinct Agent Phil?
This isn’t meant as insult to Hiddleston, a fine actor who is working with what he’s been given.
Fortunately, Loki’s lameness isn’t fatal. He’s actually the least essential part of The Avengers, which attracts both fanboys and regular punters not for the same old battle of good vs. evil, but for the more novel punch-ups of good vs. good.
Peter Howell is a syndicated Toronto Star movie critic.