Sometimes you can tell how concerned about a movie’s reception the publicists are by how much free stuff is on offer to the reviewers and the advance-watchers and the plus-ones. At the preview of the second Transformers movie they put on a pastry buffet, served coffee and then had a raffle for Transformers keyboards and USB sticks. For Green Lantern there was a party room with a DJ, green ice cream and action figures.
The Avengers is excellent and I’d have thought so even without a beer and a pair of complimentary Iron Man 3-D glasses handed to me by a guy in costume.
But the preview screening for The Avengers was the most generous one I’ve been to. Booze and soft drink, popcorn, chocolate bars, mini hot dogs and a DJ along with three guys in bodypaint as the Hulk, Captain America and Iron Man posing for photos. It wasn’t exactly Caligula, but it was free stuff and journalists love free stuff.
None of that was necessary though, because The Avengers is excellent and I’d have thought so even without a beer and a pair of complimentary Iron Man 3-D glasses handed to me by a guy in costume.
Those three guys in the cheap dress-up reminded me of what superhero movies used to look like, before Hollywood realised how much money there was in making movies that appealed to both nerds and people with haircuts and sex lives. Back in the bad old days of the 1990s superhero movies used to gleefully throw out most of the things about the original characters that fans of the comics liked and then re-tell the character’s origin story with laborious slowness as if the reason we’re here is to find out how Punchman became Punchman rather than just, you know, see him punch things.
But not anymore. You can make an argument for Tim Burton’s stiff-necked Batman, but the change really came with the success of Bryan Singer’s X-Men movie in 2000. That was a movie directed by someone who understood the appeal of the characters, with a slick screenplay that was nipped and tucked by a variety of scriptwriters, including Joss Whedon.
Like X-Men, The Avengers is about a band of unlikely heroes who have to form a surrogate family so they can save the day, which is a story Whedon is familiar with – one he’s told in shows like Buffy, Angel and Firefly. Something else he learned from those shows is how to juggle an ensemble cast, giving everybody their moment to show off both in the quiet character scenes and the flashy action sequences.
(Maybe Thor gets a little short-changed in The Avengers because they couldn’t bring Natalie Portman in to reprise her role as his love interest, but otherwise it’s spot-on.)
While most superhero movies, even the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, follow the two-villain formula, The Avengers is all about its heroes. Robert Downey Jr. still gets to crack jokes while being shot in extreme close-up inside his helmet; Chris Evans still manages to make being old-fashioned and sincere seem like viable life choices; Chris Hemsworth barks like Brian Blessed and hits things with his hammer; and Mark Ruffalo, playing Bruce Banner for the first time, actually makes me hope they manage to keep someone in the role for more than one movie.
Each of them stays true to what we’ve seen of them in their own movies – even the scenes of Iron Man flying are shot with the same long-lens naturalism Jon Favreau used in his movies, the camera seeming to struggle to keep up even when it’s entirely computer-generated – but it never feels like the heroes don’t belong together or there are too many of them.
Anyway, how can you have too many good guys?
3Screens is on Twitter: @jodymacgregor
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