Avengers Assemble is a lavishly enjoyable assemblage of everything that’s good about contemporary popcorn cinema.
“Looks like Earth might need something a little old-fashioned,” warns Samuel L Jackson’s generally furious General Fury, as the battle lines are drawn in Marvel Avengers Assemble.
He’s talking about Iron Man, Captain America, Thor and The Incredible Hulk; collectively known as The Avengers, the Travelling Wilburys of the superhero set. But if it’s old-fashioned heroism Earth needs, Earth is out of luck. Despite its pedigree (the team was launched by Marvel in 1963 as a response to DC’s Justice League of America comic, featuring Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman), Avengers is a noughties-era blockbuster to the core.
Joss Whedon’s lavishly enjoyable, chewily-titled film (the branding’s there to warn British cinema-goers that John Steed will not be making an appearance) is an assemblage of everything that’s good about contemporary popcorn cinema; just as importantly, it’s a rejection of everything that isn’t. Avengers might be short on bright ideas of its own, but co-writer and director Whedon has a magpie’s eye for stealing other people’s, and an enviable knack of improving them.
A seasoned writer of oddball fantasy shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, Whedon is the ideal man to marshal such a broad and colourful cast, and his script, structured like a stand-up comedy set with punchlines, reversals and callbacks, keeps things accessible and fluid once that awkward set-up’s past.
This is good for Downey Jr, whose Shatner-esque delivery is markedly less irritating when he has something funny to say, but even better for Johansson’s Black Widow, who’s been transformed into a level-headed action heroine in the Buffy mould: a serious step up from being the spandex-clad eye candy in Iron Man 2. Ruffalo’s Banner is given a compelling geek-tragic arc and even strait-laced Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg), a serial Marvel lurker, gets a fleshed-out role with an appealingly nerdy streak.
Commendably, Whedon and his small army of assistant directors also apply the ‘once more with feeling’ formula to Avengers’ many action sequences. A set-piece skirmish on a battleship makes more innovative use of its setting than – well, Battleship. During the climactic New York showdown with Loki’s alien crew, Whedon revamps the only memorable image from Transformers: Dark Of The Moon – a giant metal serpent constricting a tower block – and sends shoals of enormous iron dragons twisting between the Manhattan skyscrapers.
Seconds later, there’s a riff on the single-take chase sequence from Spielberg’s motion-captured Tintin film: in a kind of exploding relay race, the camera tracks Iron Man as he battles through the city, before latching onto Captain America, and then The Hulk, and so on, in one unbroken computer-generated ‘shot’. Whedon’s sequence not only has more weight and wit than Spielberg’s, it feels more coherent, and his use of 3D is more immersive.
As the first of this summer’s three superhero blockbusters (the others are The Dark Knight Rises and The Amazing Spider-Man), Avengers sets the bar impressively high, and that it does it with a smile is all the more refreshing. A lot of this stuff has been done before, and recently – but never quite as well as this.
Avengers Assemble is out in UK cinemas next Thurs 26 April
No comments:
Post a Comment