The Avengers

Directed by Joss Whedon

(PG-13)

***

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This “buoyant, witty, and robustly entertaining superhero smash-up is escapism of a sophisticated order,” said Justin Chang in Variety. Writer-director Joss Whedon took on a challenging mission: Seven of Marvel Comics’ most famous characters—Iron Man, the Hulk, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, Nick Fury, and Hawkeye—have united to thwart Loki, a baddie who’s in possession of a cube that gives him the power to marshal an alien army and enslave all mankind. But despite the difficulty of having to lash together so many formulaic backstories, the movie proves to be “a clean-burning, six-cylinder entertainment” that smoothly combines sincerity, self-effacing humor, and “CG-inflated, 3-D-augmented geek-out mayhem.”

You can see the $220 million budget in most every frame, said David Edelstein in New York magazine. The movie’s look has “the thrust of good comic-book illustrations, without overdoing it.” Better yet, the surfeit of co-stars means a viewer never bores. As soon as you tire of Tom Hiddleston’s “magnificently theatrical” villain or Chris Evans’s “rather colorless” Captain America, up pops Scarlett Johansson as an appropriately prickly Black Widow, or the well-sculpted Chris Hemsworth as Thor.

The film’s crucial standoff pits Iron Man against the Hulk, thanks to Robert Downey Jr.’s wisecracking and a “beautifully honed” performance by Mark Ruffalo, said Henry Barnes in The Guardian (U.K.). Ruffalo plays scientist Bruce Banner as a man who fears his Hulk alter ego, and the character’s inner conflict adds ballast to all the amusing jostling his peers engage in as they try to settle on the team’s pecking order. Unfortunately, the intramural “biff-bang-pow” carries on a bit too long, and the threat they’re confronting just fizzles. Because the formidable Loki is backed by “a horde of faceless, disposable allies,” we never really worry that evil might win out. But until the two camps finally face off, it’s mostly fun watching superheroes bickering. It’s “child’s play, maybe, but entertaining all the same.”