The Avengers

All right, saw The Avengers last weekend, mainly due to the prodding of the wife. Don’t get me wrong; I like a good comic book movie. The thing is, I like them less and less the more come out. It’s getting to be a tired genre for me. Know what I’m saying?

Anyway, I was never a big comic book reader as a kid. As a matter of fact, I recall reading only two. Yes, two. One was in our fourth grade class, and I read it over and over and over. So much so that I still try to seek it out and have even blogged about it, here. The other was one that made its appearance in our basement around the same time. Dr. Doom, I think it was, but whether that was the name of the comic or just its villain I don’t recall.

So, I had no big investment going into this flick. I liked Iron Man, though I thought Robert Downey Jr’s mugging a tiringly excessive. I liked The Hulk movies, I guess, despite a different actor playing Bruce Banner each time. I liked the Thor movie, more so than I expected, but I think that was because a) it was campy and b) that 100-foot robotic monster thingie was cool. Didn’t see Captain America. And I don’t know any of the other characters, background or otherwise, of the Avengers.

I watched it with the wife Saturday night and it went by fast. One action scene after the other, and the plot not making too much sense. Special effects, yeah, okay, they were spectacular, but spectacular in a boring way. The bad guy – “Loki” – was not at all intimidating and, quite frankly, I had no idea what he was up to, other than stealing and trying to keep this magical power source somehow Samuel L. Jackson, decked out like a modern-day pirate, was experimenting on. I guess. I didn’t take notes, and none of this was meaningful for me.

The Avenger’s ship really irked the rationalist in me. I mean, c’mon, you have a battleship, okay, but then you put hovercraft engines so it can fly? Really? Why? What’s the purpose? Isn’t that a colossal waste of energy? Who pays for this?

There were hints of some intergalactic baddies behind Loki’s half-hearted attempts at evilness. I guess if you read the comics you’d know who they were and they’d have some relevance for you. But I couldn’t be the only viewer of this film who was not familiar with the Avenger’s universe of villains, could I? I don’t recall these lizard-like beings, er, being explained in any way. The producers are probably saving them up for a sequel, which, were I Stan Lee, I’d be a little worried may never come to fruition.

Or it might. I have no idea what the movie grossed. It was probably a lot, somewhere in the hundreds of millions, but that’s also probably what the film cost, special effects and marketing all adding up.

So … The Avengers was entertaining in a mindless sort of way, and while it didn’t necessarily cause the superhero movie to jump the shark for me, it did continue towards the superhero movie malaise that Hopper is currently experiencing.

Grade: C.