The Avengers

Having seen most of Joss Whedon's TV and film output (all of Buffy, Angel, Firefly and Dollhouse, as well as Serenity), I'm pretty familiar with Whedon's quippy dialogue cadence, and his dramatic storytelling tropes, so as populist entertainment, "The Avengers" succeeds as a 140-minute thrilling roller-coaster ride for the comic book nerds, while also being accessible to the general public. In fact, it's almost a love letter to comic book nerds in how the plot unfolds, and produces match-ups between the heroes in a way to vetting one another before they are tasked with the avenging in an effort to protect Earth from being subjugated by a Loki-led army for a would-be alien conqueror (Annihilus/the Other?), as Loki hunts down the Tesseract (the Cosmic Cube that is being studied as a plentiful, clean energy source referenced from the previous "Thor" film).

I found some of the fight action to be influenced heavily by WWE, but still immensely fun and entertaining. The tough part of the script was juggling so many characters, and still finding ways for each character to shine, and Whedon's script does a good job in that respect, while still maintaining good pacing overall. Even when there were spots where the story could have bogged down, we get some nice bits of dialogue that diffuses the tension with laughs. The characters are shown to know of the weaknesses and foibles of one another, but still find enough common ground to coalesce into working in a ad hoc team environment as the threats to mankind's future survival continue to manifest themselves.

The film succeeds in giving the audience what it wants, but it's not a sophisticated piece of storytelling in terms of plot structure, and a lot of the second unit action rates a tad below what a James Cameron would produce, but the action is so fast and furious, you don't have a lot of time to dwell on the minor shortcomings of spatial dynamics in how the action sequences develop. The action scenes have somewhat of a Michael Bay quality to them, but with better purpose in serving the story, and providing some dramatic tension in the final act of the film with the heroes scrambling to stem the tide of a flying army coming through the inter-spatial portal, thanks to Loki's actions.

The film's script is loaded with nuggets of character interactions which produce laughs and the fight action produced cheers and shock (in the vein of "Whoa! Did you just see that? Dayum..." The film gains momentum through its running time, though the opening act was good at setting the table, but I wasn't quite feeling it until the early middle of the film, and the film concludes well in providing plenty of menace and mayhem, and also finding small ways to address thread of character development.

You will be entertained by this film, no "ands, ifs or buts" about it. On that level, it hits the mark. I did see it in 3D, but I don't think it really adds much to its overall presentation, so seeing in in 2D should suffice if you aren't crazy about 3D anyhow.

I give it 3.5 stars, or a grade of B+ (will take in another viewing, but on IMAX, as my comic book friends want to see it on IMAX the next time just for all the fight scenes).

P.S., yes, stay for 2 additional scenes in the end credits, one comes right after the spotlighted actor credits, and the other one (so hilariously on-point) comes at the very end of the credits.