No assembly required

FILM REVIEW

Avengers Assemble
DIRECTED BY: Joss Whedon
STARRING: Robert Downey Jr, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L  Jackson, Tom Hiddleston
CERT: 12A

Avengers Assemble is the story of a group of superheroes who go shopping together in IKEA. Later at home, Thor puts all the furniture together, since a blonde, blue-eyed Norse hunk is naturally the only man for the job.
Keen to prove that he too is good with his hands, Hulk proceeds to smash the newly-assembled home décor to pieces. Tempers fray and before you know it the superheroes are kicking lumps out of each other in the kitchen.
For the sake of peace, hope, liberty and because the neighbours are threatening to call the police, Captain America makes everyone shake hands and be friends again. Then Black Widow makes tea and cake and they all laugh and joke like it never happened.
Hawkeye gets out the old photographs and it all gets quite emotional. Later, they go back to IKEA and Hulk buys a whole new set of furniture. This time everyone takes a go at the assembly, even Iron Man, who doesn’t normally help around the house.
But of course, that’s not the movie they made, oh no. Because some overpaid suit at Marvel thinks we’d all rather see these poor overworked superheroes kill aliens and save the world and stuff. It’s exploitation if you ask me, denying them the right to a normal boring life.
So here’s what they came up with. Thor (Hemsworth) has a mad brother called Loki (Hiddleston), as you will know if you saw Thor’s own movie a while back. If you’ve also seen the Iron Man films and you didn’t fall asleep like me during Captain America, then this movie might make a lot more sense. If you’re not familiar with any of the back-story, well, don’t worry. There’s still plenty to enjoy, even if there’s no tea.
Anyway, this Loki chap is a bit bonkers. He’s gotten hold of the Tesseract, a mighty substance in a nifty cosmic cube that he plans to use to destroy civilization as we know it, with the help of some extra-terrestrial friends.
So the SHIELD agency head honcho Nick Fury (Jackson) decides it’s time to round up some super brains and brawn to teach this pup a lesson. Thus the Avengers Initiative is born.
Trouble is Thor, Hulk (Ruffalo), Iron Man (Downey Jr) and Captain America (Evans) are not accustomed to sharing the limelight with other type-A personalities with cooler super powers than their own. Tempers fray and before you know it the superheroes are kicking lumps out of each other. Eventually, for the sake of mankind, the future and global merchandise sales, they grudgingly agree to put their differences aside to save the world from Loki and his giant alien invaders. SHIELD agent Black Widow (Johansson) lends a capable hand but no cake, Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) is along for the ride and Hawkeye (Renner) never does get round to the family album but he’s fairly nifty with a bow and arrow. He and Katniss Everdeen will one day swap hunting tips in the dystopian intergalactic adventure, Hunger In Space.
You’d be forgiven for approaching Avengers Assemble with low expectations, seeing as how Thor and Captain America (and to some extent Iron Man 2) hardly set the bar too high in the run up to this big get-together. It’s a strange and rare pleasure, however, to say that Avengers is a fine film, a great superhero movie and the kind of big-budget adventure that a summer blockbuster should be.
It was never going to be a simple task to bring all of these characters together, give each of them time to establish their place and make them gel as a super-powered unit in a story that’s lots of fun and packed with enjoyable action but somehow writer/director Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Dollhouse), whose only other feature film to date was the low-budget but entertaining Serenity, has managed to pull it off.
The main thing that sets his film apart from the big-budget CGI junk like Battleship and the Transformers sequels, is that Whedon clearly cares about the individual characters, their weaknesses and their strengths.
Captain America can’t get his old-fashioned 1940s mind around this strange future, or make head nor tail of Iron Man’s wit. After all these years and two recent movies, it is Whedon and the excellent Mark Ruffalo who finally get to the heart of Hulk’s tormented alter-ego, Bruce Banner. It’s a nice shock to find that the giant green monster is the best of the gang here.
The other crucial ingredient in Avengers, the one that is most neglected in superhero films and blockbuster movies in general, is the humour. There’s lots of it here and most of it works.
Robert Downey Jnr, as you’d imagine, gets his fair share of the gags, but there’s plenty to go around and even Hulk and Loki get in on the laughs.
All that’s really missing is some genuinely evil adversaries for the lads. Loki is a fine villain but his alien cohorts are just a bunch of faceless yokes who turn up to make bits of New York and make themselves available for a good hiding. The action is decent and all, but you need a foe with a bit more badness.
Then again, there’s more than meets the eye with Nick Fury’s Avengers Initiative malarkey and the post-credits snippet suggests that next time around it might get a little darker.
Unfortunately, in the meantime, we’ll have to make do with more of the team’s individual movies.