The Avengers: A Surprisingly Entertaining Superhero Movie

Before the review, I have a couple quick announcements:

1. On December 31st, I will be post my favorite actor, actress, director, etc. of 2012.
2. Depending on scheduling, I may have a podcast up discussing the list, which will accompany the post on the 31st. Guest to be announced.

Now that that's out of the way, let's continue the list:   

5.

The Avengers

Crossovers, whether it be in movies or TV shows, have the chance to be amazing or completely un-watchable. There are plenty of examples of success, albeit to varying degrees, on television. The most successful one that comes to mind is Buffy and Angel, which had a lot to do with the genius of Joss Whedon and his writing staffs. And on the complete opposite end of the scale are the crossovers that occur on the Disney Channel, which has a lot to do with these shows having completely different writing staffs.

Most of the time these collaborations, for better or worse, occur over a short period of time and have very minimal build up. So their success or failure, doesn't harm the individual shows. The Avengers, on the other hand, had a completely unique and insane build-up for a crossover.

It all started with an after the credits scene during Iron Man in 2008 that began a four-year build up, which culminated with a $220 million dollar gamble to combine four franchises in to one movie. And fortunately, for fans of the comics, the producers and Marvel Studios the gamble paid off big time. And it was no surprise that the master of crossovers, Joss Whedon, was at the helm.

Whedon's script took the best from each movie and combined it into a seamless 2-hour-plus narrative. The villain made sense, the reason for the Initiative was plausible and the conflict between the heroes seems genuine and not superficial. Instead of sculpting an all-star team, Whedon turned the Avengers into a dysfunctional family, which made the movie better because there was an emotional component that coincided with the main conflict, aka "kill the baddie". He made them seem human even if they may be gods.

This is just a fun, fun movie. Sure, it has the popcorn action moments (that are awesome), but it also has heart and comedy, which again is a hallmark of Whedon's scripts. Every actor plays their role as well as they did in the individual films, and even the change from Edward Norton to Mark Ruffalo felt like the right move. His style fits the script better than Norton, which helped the chemistry and contributed to the greatness of the film.

Release date: May 4th

Reason for ranking: There's not a better example of a movie being ranked high just because I enjoyed the film. In a "Best of" list, this may have come in lower.