In the interest of full disclosure, I include myself. My own review is listed as one of the negative reviews listed on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2012, I was writing for a now-defunct website called CraveOnline, and my review accrued a great deal of hatred from the world’s many “Avengers” fans merely because I gave it a 6 out of 10.
I felt — and still feel — that “The Avengers” is essentially the Platonic ideal of a Saturday morning cartoon … carrying with it all of the positives and negatives in that statement. It terms of little-kid-style thrills, “The Avengers” is first-rate. It’s slickly made and features a wide panoply of superhero action. Each character gets to interact, fight, and display their superpowers in equal measure, and the glory shots of all the costumed vigilantes gearing up for an alien invasion is everything an 8-year-old might want.
But after using several years and multiple films to set up a team-up movie, it was massively disappointing that the superheroes didn’t do anything more than, well, mere superhero stuff. One would assume that a project of this size, requiring the money and logistics that it did, would have something novel to say about superherodom. That it would deconstruct heroism, kill a character, comment on the morals of vigilantism, or do something — anything! — that couldn’t be found on a comic book page. It merely repeated another medium. It felt like a cover song.
Ultimately, “The Avengers” was a movie about very little, leaving its ambitions feel slight and paltry. It was about … teamwork, I guess. The kind of thing we learned in the first grade. It’s thrilling on a visceral level, but it would have been nice if the filmmakers had something to say.
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