"Ten bucks says you're wrong."
Whedon pulls off this seemingly-impossible task with great aplomb, his whip-smart script capturing the feel of the individual characters effectively, stringing together multiple threads into a strong through story, pulling off the multiple-character balancing act surprisingly well and - perhaps most importantly - capturing the comic-book superhero style with genuine humour, drama and panache. The incredibly strong cast is uniformly terrific, one of the film's many pleasures being the way that characters bounce off each other in a variety of combinations and situations, both in dialogue and in action scenes (the Iron Man vs Thor smackdown is especially thrilling). The huge ambition and scale of the special effects is quite stunning, emphasised by the very effective use of 3D, particularly evident in the final borderline-insane battle which makes the final act of Transformers: Dark Of The Moon seem positively restrained. Minor quibbles include the fact that a couple of set-pieces don't quite hang strongly with the overall narrative, and occasionally dialogue-heavy/exposition scenes feel a little too long, but these are minor gripes. Whedon takes the Marvel universe seriously, but also manages to squeeze out some genuine laughs along the way: one moment in the finale was so ridiculously and hilariously unexpected that it got applause from the first-night audience. Of particular note are Mark Ruffalo as the big screen's best incarnation of Bruce Banner/The Hulk so far, and Tom Hiddleston makes for a terrific villain as Thor's returning Loki. Avengers Assemble could have gone so very wrong, but Whedon has created a superb piece of Summer blockbuster entertainment.
No comments:
Post a Comment