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"FacebookPinterest\n\n The Avengers made me laugh a whole lot. That may sound to fanboys like a sacrilegious way to sing the praises of Marvel's all-star extravaganza, but it's great news for everyone whose affection for the Marvel universe favors puckishness over awe. Even if one or two of the separate character reboots leading up to this group unveiling left you indifferent\u2014and I confess, I never did get around to checking out Thor\u2014watching the ensemble unite in fractious action is well-nigh irresistible. And the best thing about the movie is that I can't think of another Marvel-derived summer blockbuster that came this close to channeling Stan Lee's own antic spirit.\n\n True, my own lonesome all-time Marvel fave is Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, which just proves I was never one of the cool kids. (Future critics never are, but Lee himself thinks the Howlers are some of his best work\u2014so nyah, nyah.) But anyway. When people put Marvel's 1960s mastermind on a pedestal, they've been known to underappreciate that Lee was, among other things, a great wisecracker. Not only didn't he take himself too seriously\u2014that was a given\u2014but nobody in comics was better at using grumpy asides and tomfoolery to establish character. That was a big part of why readers identified with his creations (and him) more intimately than we ever did with Superman, Batman and the rest of D.C.'s Easter Island superhero gallery. \n\n Any Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan knows how much Avengers director and co-writer Joss Whedon learned from Lee, making Whedon the ideal guy to fuse trad and new tricks here. The gags never ring false; they are quick ways of reviving our affection for characters who, in another of Lee's innovations, were mostly at least semi-conscious\u2014downright painfully so, in the Incredible Hulk's case\u2014of their own absurdity.\n\n The plot does have its unwieldy side. Under the supervision of Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), scientists at a remote S.H.I.E.L.D. research site are futzing with an energy cube called the Tesseract when it starts acting up, creating a portal in space for Thor's evil half-brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), to zap back from celestial exile. Brainwashing Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) into changing sides, he swipes the Tesseract so he can use its power to summon an alien army of creepy-looking space gargoyles he's met somewhere up there and get busy conquering the Earth, abetted by subjugated physicist Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard). Time for Fury and Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg, doing a real nice job as the movie's own disguised version of a fanboy) to get the Avengers together, wouldn't you say? Oh, you would?\n\n Whedon takes his time assembling them, though. Maybe more than he needs to, in fact. Reintroducing us to the whole gang requires separate set-up sequences for each, and that's sometimes lumpy going early on. But once they're all bickering and bantering aboard the giant flying aircraft carrier that serves as S.H.I.E.L.D.'s mobile headquarters\u2014sardonic Tony Stark a.k.a. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), newly defrosted 1940s relic Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans), sultry Natasha Romanoff a.k.a. Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson), and sheepish Bruce Banner a.k.a. the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), with muscle-bound Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Marvel equivalent of Archie's Moose, winging their way\u2014the movie is off to the races.\n\n By then, Loki is aboard himself, held in a maximum-security fishbowl originally designed to quarantine the Hulk whenever the, you know, green thing happens. He's been captured by Captain America and Iron Man after unwisely rehearsing his ruler-of-Earth bit in Germany\u2014of all places, right? (Whedon knows how to allude to the real world without overdoing it; puncturing the idealism balloon, the later revelation of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s own unlovely plans for the Tesseract has its modern-day resonance, too.) Thinking he can talk sense to his half-brother, Thor busts him out for a Norse-style therapy session that doesn't take, which is the reason Loki's back in the airborne slammer in time for Hawkeye, who's still under his spell, to lead the rescue mission that turns into the movie's big second-act action brawl. \n\n Even as plot logic goes by the wayside\u2014Black Widow has already tricked Loki into revealing his plan, but she never acts on the info or thinks to pass it along\u2014you may not be able to stop giggling in pure pleasure at the fantastically elaborate derring-do Whedon uncorks in this sequence. Not only does he keep it going well after someone less inventive would have run out of gas, but he's practically teasing us into wondering how in hell he'll top it come Act 3. He does, though, and one reason his humongous set-pieces don't degenerate into the usual demolition derby is that he never loses sight of opportunities for character-driven comedy, no matter how many CGI baddies are whizzing all over the screen.\n\n That's why this is one of the rare comic-book movies that people may come out of talking about the acting, not just the stunt work. By now, there aren't many surprises left in Downey's Tony Stark, but he sure knows how to pretend otherwise. Better yet are Evans's proud-to-be-square Captain America\u2014reminded that Loki and Thor are practically gods, he sternly answers \"There is only one God\" before thoughtfully adding, \"And I'm sure He doesn't dress that way\"\u2014and, especially, Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner, a really beautiful (I'm not kidding) compound of disguised woe and rueful gallows humor. Ruffalo has a wonderful moment when he breaks his rule of only calling his battering-ram alter ego \"the other guy.\" Realizing he's just said \"Hulk\" instead amuses and pains him all at once, and it's the movie's single most poignant grace note.\n\n As for Tom Hiddleston, a dude who can go in the space of a year from expertly facsimilizing F. Scott Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris and adding welcome dash to Steven Spielberg's soggy War Horse to playing Loki with this much wit\u2014and feeling, too\u2014is pretty clearly an actor destined to make Michael Fassbender worry that he's yesterday's news. Otherwise, Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury is maybe more tamped-down and less fun than you'd expect, but the only cast member who seems less than clued in about what kind of movie she's in is\u2014gee, howdja guess?\u2014Scarlett Johannson. She's not bad, exactly, but to put it gently, projecting brainy cunning isn't her strong suit. And one thing nearly all of Marvel's characters have in common is that they're not only smart, but enjoy it.\n\n That's a minor glitch, though. It isn't the only one, because no director has ever totally mastered the insane logistics of a giant comic-book movie, and Whedon is no exception. But as usual, we've got a glut of those coming our way this summer. Feel lucky that things kicked off with one this good."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-carson-avengers-marvel-comics-review>