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" Because so many of the biggest, most expensive summer movies these days are based on old comic books, they can sometimes seem kind of stale. Peter Parker broods over web-slinging, Bruce Banner his sudden greenness; and then there is Watchmen or The Dark Knight, over-compensating for stereotypes \u2014 the ordinary behind their superness \u2014 with a whole lot of violence, pseudo-realism, or some combination therein. They try to make us feel like more intelligent viewers. But what&amp;#039;s so bad about being straightforward? It&amp;#039;s how comic books got big in the first place, and it&amp;#039;s what The Avengers, despite being the biggest, most celebrity-packed superhero movie of all time, does best. The good-natured nerdiness of writer/director Joss Whedon turns out to be an asset: He doesn&amp;#039;t try to fuss with the Marvel superhero team (around for about fifty years now), or make the story at all ironic, nor injected with references to Barack Obama and MTV. Instead, he clears away the often-annoying origin story and gets to what people want: the (yes, kind of dumb) action. The characters say things like &amp;quot;teraflops&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;I was burdened with glorious purpose,&amp;quot; and they do not wink. There are giant alien worm things that demolish New York City. Until the Avengers handily kick their ass. Then Iron Man pours himself a drink. There&amp;#039;s a small, mostly insignificant scene somewhere in the middle of the movie, in which Captain America asks if his uniform isn&amp;#039;t too &amp;quot;old-fashioned.&amp;quot; Someone replies, &amp;quot;A little old fashion might be just what people need.&amp;quot; It might as well be Joss Whedon reaching out of the screen, reminding us of the joy of a simple thing caked by hundreds of millions of dollars of CGI. So, yeah, it&amp;#039;s the biggest superhero movie ever made, but it&amp;#039;s also exactly what superhero movies needed. PLUS: The End of Superheroes, Robert Downey Jr., Cobie Smulders on Guns, and The Biggest Summer Movies Ever "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a13921/the-avengers-review-8559325/>