The Avengers might be a good follow up to five essentially unrelated movies that ties all the characters together, and it might have great action but it suffers at the hands of Joss Whedon, who should never be allowed near movies again.

The writing is corny and melodramatic. The villain has a cookie-cutter motivation (I want to get the MacGuffin so I can take over the world because I'm better) which seems to be the case in these films. Loki was entirely forgettable as a villain. The scenes between Black Widow and Hawkeye, and Phil Coulson and Nick Fury had cringeworthy dialog and delivery. One thing I noticed which I've never noticed before in a movie was that the lighting in all the indoor sections was really bad. It made everything look like it was from 2004.

Nobody acted well in this movie, but the three worst offenders were Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L Jackson, and Mark Ruffalo. All three are good actors/actresses, but Scarlett was completely wooden as Black Widow, Jackson was corny as hell as Fury, and Ruffalo reeked of a high schooler trying to remember his lines for the school play. All three of them have put in excellent performances before, especially Ruffalo in Zodiac, but here they all **** the bed. Robert Downey Jr. also put in his most obnoxious Tony Stark performance yet, mostly due to the horrible, unfunny one-liners he was given. That kind of sums up The Avengers: one-liners. Everyone, even the God of Thunder himself, mostly just spews one-liners at each other. Every character is Tony Stark. Even Captain America.

There were good things though: The fact that most of the conflict involved the Avengers and their in-fighting was a great idea. The action was really well done, especially the helicarrier scene in which everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong.

The Avengers had some good action and isn't that enough? Well, not it's not. Not when your movie is two and a half hours, an hour and a half of which being dialog. There are better movies in this series, like both Captain America Movies, the first Iron Man, and The Incredible Hulk. If people like this movie, that's fine. I'm fairly picky so I'm probably being too hard on it. But to me, this movie is highly overrated much like the franchise in general.