Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, Chris Evans as Captain America and Scarlett Johanssonas Black Widow in The Avengers
A bunch of us comic book fans got together the other night at the premiere of The Avengers, an awesome movie that pretty well persuaded me that, whatever awesome means, I’m against it.
A lot of us were dressed in Spandex and tights to mark the moment. I came as my alter ego Captain Cranky, whose super-power is that he can nap ferociously on the couch while golf is on. Unfortunately, my sidekick — a guy in the neighbourhood who’s almost as old as me — couldn’t make it. He told me the other day that when he’s listening to the radio and someone says “singer-songwriter,” he changes the station.
But I digress. The Avengers runs two hours and 20 minutes, which is almost as long as golf, but you’re not going to sleep through it, believe me. It’s about a bunch of good superheroes who are fighting a bunch of bad superheroes for control of the Earth. For everyone who watched the Iron Man movies and thought, “is that what Robert Downey Jr. is doing now?,” The Avengers is a chance to also say, “is that what Mark Ruffalo is doing now?” and “so that’s what happened to Scarlett Johansson.” No one is likely to say “is that what Samuel L. Jackson is doing now?” because that’s what he’s always doing. The difference is that in The Avengers, he has an eye-patch.
Downey Jr. plays Iron Man, and he’s one of the highlights of The Avengers because he speaks with that quick, matter-of-fact irony that gives most of his roles an air of tossed-off cynicism. When he says to Bruce Banner, “I’m a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into a huge green rage monster,” you know Banner isn’t going to get angry and become The Hulk because who can get angry at puckishness?
Banner is played by Ruffalo, who has a nice easy charm. He’s a scientific genius who is compared to Stephen Hawking — The Avengers is nothing if not inclusive — and we all laughed when he finally became The Hulk and started slamming people around. This was mostly because he was so unrepentant about it but also because we all know The Hulk is just a temper tantrum made flesh, so his rages have become endearing.
The Avengers counts on a lot of that previous knowledge, like a connection between Hawkeye, a can’t-miss archer — so that’s what Jeremy Renner is doing now — and Black Widow, who is Johansson’s character and whose superpower is that she wears a tight black jumpsuit. Something happened between them in a previous film, or maybe a comic book, or maybe just in the imagination of the screenwriters, and so when he is taken away by the villain, a demi-god of some sort named Loki (Tom Hiddelston), and turned into a bad guy, there’s some emotional torment in Black Widow, although it in no way effects the fit of her jumpsuit.
Much of The Avengers takes place in a flying fortress where Jackson, whose character is named Nick Fury and who is, indeed, angry, has assembled these superheroes and more. He’s trying to get back a cube of energy that’s been stolen by Loki and blah blah blah, but the upshot is some terrific battles in space, and a big final confrontation in New York City, where mechanical aliens smash buildings and fire death rays while the superheroes fight back with arrows, guns, bolts of energy and, in a pinch, The Hulk.
It’s really well done — or at least really expensive-looking — and although you may think you’ve seen this kind of thing before (didn’t the Transformers movies cover, or destroy, the same ground?), it has great popcorn-movie value. It’s mindless, explosive fun, which is probably what they mean by awesome except that just about everything else in popular culture is also mindless, explosive fun, and there’s only so much awe to go around.
It ends with the promise of more sequels and spinoffs: Ruffalo has already signed on to make some Hulk movies, and I’m looking forward to those. He looks like the kind of a guy who, if they said “singer-songwriter,” he wouldn’t change the station. He’d go down there and shove the transmitter up their ass. There’s room for someone like that down at the old guy’s club.
