One of Avengers crowning Loony Tunes moment is a stand-off between Loki and the Hulk. “Enough” Loki shouts at the charging giant. “You are all beneath me, I am a god, you dark creature” and the Hulk, whips him on the pavement like wet laundry.
“Puny god” the Hulk replies, walking away. Now, who can not love a movie where a megalomaniacal demi-god ends up wheezing on the concrete?
At the end of Marvel’s "The Avengers," there’s another of those annual city-leveling motion picture climaxes where an unnamed island-like metropolis is smashed to smithereens by a superior ET attack.
The destruction is borne out by Tom Hiddleston’s excellently Shakespearean Loki. He’s an extraterrestrial deity from Asgard and Thor (Chris Hemsworth)’s bitter and desirous little brother who wants to “free the world from freedom” — just like every super villain?
As it happens, concrete is pulverised to dust, people run for their lives, and lots of four-wheelers blow-up. In the midst we see a civilian’s reaction: a wide-eyed waitress, her hair in disarray, looks at the blitzkrieg off-camera. This standard, annual, blow-up practice — showcased in gleeful abandon during the plenty-awful trailer — was the prime reason why I had low-expectations for "The Avengers," now playing in screens worldwide; it might be giddy-fun, and thoroughly unoriginal to write and shoot, but really, we’ve grown accustomed to transforming robots, amphibious lizards or whirring-alien balls wrecking city-scapes all the time. So, um, remind me why it’s better?
But it is. The who’s, the what’s and the why’s don’t matter — Much. And besides, four solo-Avenger movies with post-credits tie-ups later, we already know what’s up – Tasseract (the cosmic-cube and the film’s MacGuffin) be damned!
For the yet uninitiated, the big-bang summer release, now at $850 million at the Box Office worldwide, strings up Marvel’s individual free-floating heroes into a loose-knit group whose naturally-inclined aptitudes for annihilating counterparts any attacking aliens – mythical, genetically powered, world-devouring or any of the assorted sorts that turn up in comics. The roll-call is: Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor, Captain America (Chris Evans), the Hulk (Mark Ruffallo), Natasha Romanoff aka. the Black Widow (Scarlet Johanson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) — all flawlessly importing their characters from before.Agent Phil Coleson (Gregg Clark, shining) graduates into the group’s official fan-boy. However, the deftness is scattered around pretty evenly in the screenplay by director Joss Whedon and Zack Penn; the two have a staggering amount of craftiness and superhero know-how within them and it shows.
While the movie hopscotches from brawl-to-brawl, there’s plenty of character-play time for the actors: Captain America, lost from his time, has ethical unrest flagging him. Stark, he’s one of the troubled guys with both the money and the means to rightfully go kooky (Downey Jr.’s screen-presence immediately shouts out “there’s a star in the room”). Natasha and Hawkeye find a quiet moment to bear out their souls. Thor, well, he’s just here for his brother’s pick-up.
It takes a moment to whir-up its machine, but when it’s revved up, it’s impossible to contain the scatterbrained excitement. The Avenger’s is a throw-down adapting, in essence, the best-of-moments from the comics. Heroes meet, bicker and hammer each other in separate moments of reverential and campy fan-service that beats-out conventionality and obligations of creating the “first” movie of a franchise (logically, though, it is the fifth in the series).
Hammer meets Armor meets Shield. There’s an early three-way brawl between Captain America, Iron Man and Thor. Then, a Hulk vs. Thor rumble; Black Widow vs. Hulk (Johansson’s lissome body-double –Heidi Moneymaker – is entrancing); the Widow vs. Hawkeye. Iron man vs. a propeller engine (really, not joking). The main casualties are trees and dead control panels – depending on where the other party rams into.
As brilliantly oiled up as they are in the climax — even out-dazzling Marvel’s other group the X-Men — the Avenger’s real tide-turner is the green-skinned monster Hulk, the odd-one-out of the group who’s two movies down and still seeking his Avenger-buddies box-office payday. A few moments before the climatic sequence goes full-roar, Bruce Banner – played with shrewd calmness and unexpected congeniality by Ruffallo — rides into the debris-filled set on a sputtering bike. In his last scene Banner, who metamorphoses into the indestructible giant when he gets angry, leveled a major portion of the S.H.I.E.L.D Helli-Carrier, run by war-dog Nick Fury.
When Iron Man brings “the party” — gargantuan, mechanical extra-terrestrial ship — to the ground team, Captain America asks Banner that “now might be a really good time to get angry”. “That’s my secret Captain”, he replies. “I am always angry.” It’s nonsensically poetic when the Hulk whams-down the gargantuan monster with one blow. His orders are simple: “Hulk Smash!” — And boy does he!
