The Avengers is pretty clearly not a great or even very good movie — the plotting is feeble, the action routine, the characters mere quipsters. So how to account for the deafening acclaim? Me, I blame the fanboys* and their ongoing efforts to hijack movie criticism. With so many older critics having been put out to pasture recently, and with so many younger critics coming up through the blogosphere, the scale was already tipping drastically in favour of the Ain’t-it-Cool-News approach to reviewing — a scary combo of PR-influenced hype, consensus thinking, and woefully minimal standards. But now, even the non-fanboy critics are affected — they know that panning The Avengers or The Dark Knight means being hounded and pilloried by the online hordes, so unless they’re gluttons for punishment, they temper their criticisms with conciliatory phrases like: “The fans will love it,” or “It gets the job done.” But who is this serving? The fanboys don’t need anybody to tell them they’ll love The Avengers — that’s a foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, the on-the-fence moviegoers — the ones who might actually care what the critics have to say — get sold yet another rotten bill of goods.
To be fair, there’s nothing outrageously bad about The Avengers, it’s just hollow and forgettable. It has none of the mythic grandeur of, say, the 1978 Superman, nor does it have anything like the hero-as-outcast allegory of the X-Men films or the super-powers-as-metaphor-for-puberty aspect of Spider-Man. The Avengers is all surface — an empty gathering of teflon titans — and there’s no way to connect to the characters or to identify with them. They’re just costumed celebs trading barbs and jostling for screen time. Writer-director Joss Whedon seems content with that, as if simply throwing these characters together was all the entertainment we needed. But unless you’re the type to honestly wonder who’d win in a fight between Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America (spoiler: it’s a tie!), you’ll probably feel something’s lacking.
To his credit, Whedon doesn’t just jump from set-piece to set-piece; he gives the characters time to interact and to get to know one another. But for the life of me, I have never understood what people see in his writing. I admit, sheepishly, that I’ve never really watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’ve seen Firefly and Serenity and The Cabin in the Woods and I found them all tiresome. Here’s Whedon’s routine: character #1 says something blandly conventional or overly dramatic, then character #2 responds with some winking, meta-textual wisecrack that a) lets Whedon off the hook for the first line, and b) lets the audience know he’s more hip to the conventions than anyone, so hip he can make a joke out of it. I call this the two-wrongs-make-a-right school of dramaturgy, and the overall effect is that the characters feel less like characters and more like Whedon’s personal mouthpieces. No matter how invested you might be in them, you always see the author in your mind’s eye, typing away on his laptop. If there’s joy to be had in Whedon’s world, it’s the post-modern joy of not believing.
In The Avengers, all of the characters are highly aware they’re in a big, dumb blockbuster, and the fun, I guess, is that they keep letting us know it. As Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. has maybe two lines pitched directly to his fellow characters — the rest of the time he pitches right to the audience, and his jokey delivery is so smooth and mannered that he becomes exhausting almost immediately. As agent Nick Fury, Samuel L. Jackson gets all the thuddingly conventional lines — “War has started, and we are hopelessly outgunned” — and every time he opens his mouth you half expect the shark from Deep Blue Sea to burst in and devour him. As Thor, Chris Hemsworth gets very little to do, and in the new role of Hawkeye, Jeremy Renner gets even less — in the very first scene, he’s hypnotized by the villain Loki (Tom Hiddleston), and the movie is half over before we even get a glimpse of his real self. (It doesn’t help that his super-talent, archery, is so low-tech — he comes across as a needless tag-along.)
Chris Evans’ Captain America is maybe the most ingratiating of the bunch. Having been flung into our era from the 1950s, he’s hopelessly old-fashioned and earnest, and he doesn’t get how the others can make jokes when the fate of the world is at stake. Accordingly, he begins to seem like the only human being onscreen. The other MVPs are Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow, who gets a few nice set-piece sequences, and Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner, aka the Hulk. While the other Avengers elbow one another for the spotlight, Ruffalo gets our attention by quietly underplaying everything. His Banner has to keep cool at all times lest his dangerously volatile alter-ego come bursting forth, so Ruffalo adds just a hint of edge to his usual laid-back demeanour. He’s a nice, polite time-bomb, and we never know when he’s going to go off.
I expect the majority of moviegoers will be perfectly content with The Avengers — it’s not a stupid movie, and you could do a lot worse. But it never gets hold of your imagination the way the best comic-book movies can. A week has passed since I saw it, and already I find myself straining to remember much. This won’t matter to the fanboys, of course. Years from now, when they’ve taken over the entire world, they’ll look back on this movie and think, “Yes, this is where our reign began.”
* fan-boy: noun, informal. a person of either sex who mindlessly praises anything (a film, a TV show, etc.) that caters to their personal interests, regardless of quality. (Often misconstrued to mean: anyone who enjoys fantasy or science-fiction.)
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Scott MacDonald writes about cinema for Toronto Standard.
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