The Avengers


The Avengers
*ing
Rated: 8.5/10

The Avengers is as perfect as it can get when an expert shakes up a cocktail of action and adventure in a soft bottle of humour, gives it a dash of vintage heroism and then splashes it across the universe in big, mean machines and outer space reptilian warships whose lashing tails can blow away all the Manhattan in New York. 

The Adventures is also the best dose of alien spree that has come in a long while. As a precurser to a year which will be activitating Superman and Batman too, The Avengers stands tall on the broad shoulders of not one but five superheroes we have cherished over the decades — Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, the Hulk and, of course, the Black Widow played to perfection by a toned up Scarlett Johansson who has a “a bad bit of Red on her CV”.

The good thing about this without-a-pause sci-fi thriller is that it is not limited to its syrupy action heroes. Even villain Loki, a God with too many negative human ambitions, kills you with his sweet smile and evil eye, a combination of contrasts that Tom Hiddleston manages to blend with beauty.

Other than its eccentric characters, the film rides so high on technologically perfected action sequences that you tend to forgive the director for slimming down the role of someone as histrionically superior as Samuel Jackson. As the head of a super efficient peace-keeping unit called S.H.I.E.L.D, Jackson may not have had too much footage but he does have a lot on his plate -- something that looks as uneasy as a virtually lost war to save the world against a God who wants to be king and has all the plutonium to make human surrender a spectacle of immortality.

But it is the humanness coating all the machinery that The Avengers brings in which wins your heart. Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark the Iron Man is stunningly romantic and laconic with ferocity. He is also arrogant and provocative. His wooing of super scientist Gwneth Paltrow (she is only a short glimpse in the film) stops the perpetual action in its tracks, but only to good result.

Then there is a hidden Hulk in Bruce Banner who looks so meek and angelic on the veneer that you mistake him for Mark Ruffalo instead of a doctor always insanely angry enough to expand into a destructive 100 foot Hulk, literally green with fury.

Chris Evan’s as Captain America is the vintage knight in shining armour lost in an endearing world of yore while Chris Hemsworth as Thor is a demi God let down by his “adopted” brother Loki who is out to give heavens a bad name.

Over and above all this the timing of humour, the subtelty and the delivery of it is what makes The Avengers a film to go to.

Source: The Sunday Pioneer, April 29, 2012

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