Further on the movie, I think it worked exactly as it was supposed to work, a fun action superhero movie that only holds up if you don't think TOO closely about much of it.
Which is exactly what should be happening with Superhero movies mind you. I do think that they could have trimmed down some of the fight scenes to make room for some extra time on certian other plot points...but it worked well enoughl.
As said, the writing was REALLY well done in terms of giving everyone screen time yet doing it incredibly smoothly and naturally so it didn't FEEL like 'Now thats enough time on X, lets go to Y....okay now to Z'.
With the possible exception of Loki.
I would have liked more backstory on his backers and their ultimate motives. They just felt like they were there to tick a box, "oh he needs an army, lets just say this guy and we're done!'. I never got around to seeing Thor, its the one movie out of the sequence I missed because I just wasn't interested enough, so if it was justified in there, fair enough, but otherwise its just annoying that 2-3 mins more film written well could have made them much more of a threat, as opposed to a Left For Dead type 'KILL AS MANY BAD GUYS AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN!' threat at the end.
Oh, and his "I'm going to place the Avengers in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic plan!" thing was rather eyes rolling worthy, letting himself be captured just in the hope that they all go at each others throats and the hulk gets loose. The fact that it worked was far more down to the Avengers stupidity than anything else which made Loki far too Cliché for my tastes.
Still, Tom Hiddleston did a good job all things considered, even if his 'See you hate freedom, isn't slavery awesome?' style got a little annoyingly shallow after a short time.
Back to the Avengers though, they really fit their parts perfecty.
Downey Jr as always is still just brilliant as Stark, and I have to say I love the subtle ways his incredible technological skill is shown off. Example, when SHIELDS carrier starts getting blown up good, he is the first person turned to right then and there to get out there and fix the problem, despite the fact that he probably has never BEEN on this carrier before, because he is just THAT level of f*#(king Genius he is able to quickly figure the problem and fix it. Nice to see Paltrow show up a few times, I thought it was going to be a five second thing and then thats it, which was nice. Although I would have been a bit happier if Stark had been the one to ask Jennings to make the phone call at the end rather than the other way around.
Chris Evans still worked well as the Captain, although the uniform needs work rather urgently. The didn't go overboard with the whole 'I'm out of my time!' which can always be a risk...if anything, I'd suggest they probably underdid it a little. Quietly handing $10 to Fury when he walks onto the bridge was well done though as was the 'last time I was in Germany' line to Loki. The sudden assuming command at the end there was cool but still felt a little jarring, they had been laying the groundwork but not enough of it for 'The Moment' IMHO.
Chris Hemsworth did well as Thor to maintain an almost 'alien' sense about him, no small thing given that he just runs like another version of Captain America for the most part. As I never saw Thor, its hard for me to say terribly much about his character. Worked well enough and turning the Empire State Building into a giant Telsa Coil was rather cool.
Mark Ruffalo pulled off Banner well, although I did keep rolling my eyes at Fury, Romanoff and the like who kept slowly moving their hands to their sidearms every time Banner got a little miffed. I mean FFS, you KNOW thats not going to work and looking like you are getting ready to shoot is rather counter productive. Still, the pairing of him and Stark was great, the two brilliant scientists tapdancing away on their keyboards and so on. And the arrival on the motorbike was hillarious.
Renner as Barton and Johansson as Romanoff worked well enough I suppose. I honsetly couldn't care too much about their romance -although that might be down to the heavy talking moments between them being drowned out by a bunch of kids in the theater who wouldn't shut up at that point, but thats young kids for you- but they did well enough in providing useful plot points to the otherwise overpowering team. Barton especially in providing the invaluable aid to Loki and Romanoff...no sorry, I still can't find much about her to care about (except for how hot Johansson looks in a skintight cat suit). She played her roll well, but the roll itself I'm...just not seeing except as a tangent to Barton for the most part. Their participation in the final battle just felt incredibly silly, the MIGHTY BOW AND ARROW and DUEL WEILDED PISTOLS!
When you have a man in advanced power armor, a Demigod, a man with extreme anger management issues and a mutant barely holding the line by throwing everything they have at the enemy, their survival is just silly. Romanoff SHOULD have been making for Stark Tower from the get go instead of frigen leaping onto alien fighters and surfing up to the tower. She and Barton could have been running up stairs, through buildings, hooking onto Elevators to go up e.t.c. to get to the Tesseract and you could have played to their strengths while keeping it sensible.
Instead we get the MIGHTY BOW AND ARROW SNIPER and DUEL WEILDING KUNG-FU DEATH! Which was rather 'meh' to me.
Poor Coulson
He did well enough though, and his final comments about his death providing something for the Avengers to unite around was a rather poignant moment
Jackson as always was awesome, although I was a bit surprised at the fact that the VTOL the bad guys used to get onto the Carrier was apparently a clown car given how many damn commandos kept attacking the bridge that Furry kept cheerfully picking off with his little handgun despite them being in full body armor (unless they were just getting back up because of said armor, it would have been nice to make that clear). Wonder where the hell the security forces on this thing were, we got a single shot of people grabbing rifles from a rack and then...nothing?
. I strongly recommend seeing this film.
