As crack teams of defenders of Earth go, The Avengers are a bit on the slack side. They've been assembling for over three years now, since Samuel L Jackson first broke in to Tony Stark's house at the end of
Iron Man. It's a good job an unexpected enemy hasn't emerged in that time, threatening global safety and security, because SLJ would have had to ask it to go away and re-emerge when he'd finished building his little army of weirdos.
Captain America is the final Avenger to hand over his origin story, and like all the others (except
The Incredible Hulk, which is rank) it's enjoyable fluff which starts off well before settling down into a well-worn and slightly tedious goodie vs baddie groove played out against acres of unconvincing CGI sets.
It starts off well, with an almost-sepia palette BECAUSE IT'S THE OLDEN DAYS, a cheeky
Raiders Of The Lost Ark reference to win me over and, thankfully, a convincingly weedy Chris Evans (much improved since the trailers), although he's still got a near-baritone voice despite being the size of a chicken. Tommy Lee Jones struts on and gets all the best lines, Hayley Atwell justifies the use of 3D and Stanley Tucci is the business, relishing every syllable of his ridiculous German accent.
Then Tucci injects Evans with his super serum (fnerk) and before you know it Captain America's got bigger tits than Atwell and he's leaping tall buildings in a single bound, appearing in Alan Menken musical numbers and stealthily sneaking around enemy strongholds with a brightly-coloured stars and stripes target painted on his massive shield. All of which sounds awful but is in fact rather fun.
Sadly the same can't be said of the film's dull villain, Red Skull, or his vague evil scheme - something to do with hailing hydras (hydrae?), punching the air and wearing a Hugo Weaving mask for no apparent reason - while a potentially more interesting antagonist, a soldier who believes he should have been the one given the superhero boob job, remains sadly undeveloped.
Cap spends the second half of the film repeatedly chasing and catching up with his florid-faced foe in a series of non-perilous set-pieces designed to make you long for the days when films had practical stunts shot in real locations, until the inevitable happens and we finally get to the post-credits trailer for
The Avengers everyone's been waiting three years for. SPOILER: It probably wasn't worth the wait.
In summary:
The Avengersometer
Based on this scientific data, I predict The Avengers will be Average Out Of 10.
