Not that excited about this movie. I should be -- I've been waiting for an Avengers movie since I was nine. But after seeing the trailers, I have to say I'm not holding my breath.
First of all, the cast of characters is wrong. The original Avengers were Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man, the Wasp, and the Hulk. Captain America didn't join until a few issues in, when the Avengers found him frozen in an iceberg (similar to the movie). By that time, Ant-Man had become Giant-Man (the character's real name was Hank Pym, and he would be a major character, in various incarnations, in the Marvel Universe throughout its history). For the sake of the movie, I'll give you Cap as a founding member, but Hawkeye and the Black Widow? Ugh. Yes, they too were major characters, but they were not founding Avengers. Also they're stupid. At least Hawkeye is. The Black Widow was kind of cool, but without the Cold War with the Soviet Union as a backdrop, her character loses her raison d'être. Plus, counting Cap, you now have THREE characters in a movie about super-heroes who have no super-powers. And one of them shoots arrows. Quite lame.
But that's not the only reason I'm not expecting much from Avengers. The main reason is that most of the movies made under the Marvel imprimatur just haven't been that good. The exception is the Iron Man franchise, which does an excellent job of capturing the feel of the original character, and also happen to be good action movies. But Thor was borderline unwatchable. He's a really hard character to do onscreen without having him look kind of dumb, and they did the best they could. Thor himself was an okay portrayal of the character, except that for most of the movie he wasn't even really Thor, he was just a hot guy in a tight black t-shirt. If I want that I can log on to any number of websites. If I go to a movie called Thor I wanna see THOR. Captain America was just okay. It wandered around with a lot of useless subplots. Cap was portrayed pretty well, although he was more interesting as weakling Steve Rogers. But Hugo Weaving's Red Skull was just fuckin dumb (in a rare miss for Weaving, who is normally excellent). I mean DUMB. Like the 1990s Captain America movie dumb (if you've never seen it, it's simply godawful). And the Hulk movies? The first one was complete shit. The Ed Norton one was decent -- as good as a Hulk movie could possibly be, I would say. But that's not saying much. The Hulk is, to my mind, a limited character. The long-term success of his comic book had a lot more to do with the interesting secondary characters (Thunderbolt Ross, Doc Samson, Glenn Talbot, etc.) and the cavalcade of guest characters who appeared in it (where else were you going to see Dr. Druid or the Soviet Super Troopers?). Unfortunately, the movie had none of that.
So I'd say Marvel's report card has been:
Iron Man - A Iron Man 2 - B Thor - D Captain America - C Hulk the first - F Hulk the second - B-
That's a 2.12 GPA. Ain't exactly gonna get you into Harvard. So, given their record, I expect about a C grade Avengers. I hope I'm wrong, because these characters were such a big part of my formative years, but something tells me I won't be.
