Movie review: The Avengers ****

Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth
Director: Joss Whedon
Rated: PG-13
Showing: Neptune Cinema week of Friday, May 25. For more information call 292-7296.
Tickets: Buy tickets online
Runtime: 142 minutes
Action/adventure

How was this going to work? All those Marvel superheroes, many of them with their own action franchises, packed into one epic, save-humanity-adventure.

How could anybody balance the inter-connection of back stories, the clash of personalities, the need for shared screen time, the utter necessity of building up a villain capable of putting fear in this fearsome foursome and then some?

But it works, because Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) brought his A-game to The Avengers. It works because he never loses sight of the fragile humanity of the characters, even in their special effects brawls. It works because somebody finally got The Hulk's blend of rage, guilt and bull-in-a-chandelier-shop fun right.

Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has created S.H.I.E.L.D., his super-secret superhero agency, mainly on paper. But when his minions recover the magical cube, the Tesseract, from where Captain America buried it last summer, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and The Other (Alexis Denisof) plot Loki's vengeful conquest of the Earth. Fury has to get the band together, get them to work as a team.

In an ensemble piece, Robert Downey Jr's (Tony "Iron Man" Stark) brilliant touch with the throwaway putdown is showcased to its best effect. The earnest Chris Evans (Captain America) gives just enough gravitas to the Captain, who understands how their special gifts are "a terrible privilege." Hiddleston grows into the part that seemed like a weak link in Thor, and makes the most of this guy's megalomania and bad-guy bravado.

The real fun here is in the fractious nature of the superhero team - Iron Man sniping at and brawling with Thor, Iron Man's quarrels with Captain America, the "issues" between the assassins Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye, and the "Serenity Now" ethos that Bruce Banner embraces lest "The Other Guy" (The Hulk) break out and make a mess of things.

Whedon manages to give a staggering number of characters their "moments", from Clark Gregg, the long-suffering agent whose thankless job it is to ride herd on the superheroes, to Gwyneth Paltrow's sexy paramour/ assistant to Tony Stark, Pepper Potts.

As you might expect from a movie with this many characters and that many zingers, Avengers is entirely too long and entirely too chatty. The 3D adds nothing to it, and we lose the urgency every time we lose track of the menace and the villain.