I have a confession to make: I hated The Avengers. I thought it was asinine, excessively bombastic, and devoid of any reason to care about anything going on in the movie. Let's face it: Even if you abso-friggin'-lutely LOVED The Avengers, you knew how it was going to end. Even if you were an idiot. Hopefully. I mean, Marvel isn't going to kill off any of its cash cow characters in movies, even though death means diddly-squat in comic books or comic book movies. Hell, they already had sequels planned for every main hero. No one was going to die. Everything would be all safe and fine and dandy and stuff in the end.
I love big and exciting set pieces as much as the next guy; Independence Day, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The Incredibles are some of my favorite movies. The Avengers, on the other hand, took this all UP TO ELEVEN!!! and it got really REALLY REALLY TIRING!!!!11!!1!111!!! WHEN THE ENTIRE MOVIE is SO COOL it's AWESOME!!!!! ALL of the REALLY EPIC set-pieces become SO GENERICALLY AWESOME!!! that it's like SOMEONE is YELLING ALL!!! THE!!! TIIIMEEEEE!!!!!!!!! And you're NOT given ANY space AT ALL!!! Because first we're gonna have this CHICK with the NICE ASS beat up A BUNCH OF DUDES while talking on the phone then THE HULK will be IN INDIA OR SOME PLACE!!! SUDDENLY!!! The big, bad MOTHERF***ER LOKI!!! is gonna show up and BEAT UP CAPTAIN AMERICA AND IRON MAN!!! Then we'll have A FLYING AIRCRAFT CARRIER and shit is gonna HIT! THE! FAN!!!!!! And now we're in NEW YORK CITY!!! fighting SPACE BUGS!!! while Iron Man and the big, bad MOTHERF***ER LOKI!!! will have a tense stand-off on a big building! AND THEN A NUCLEAR STRIKE IS ORDERED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111!!!!!11!!!11!!111!
You got really sick of reading that paragraph, didn't you? (Silly me, assuming people will read this... ha ha...) That's how the whole movie is: capital letters, italics, bold, underlines, exclamation points and no substance. It just leaves you sitting there wondering how long you've been sitting there and when the good guys are going to win against this big scary Loki dude and his big scary space bugs. Non-stop excitement just dilutes what would have been some admittedly pretty great action pieces. How long does it take for the shark to show up in Jaws? How much screen time does Batman actually get in Dark Knight Rises? Indiana Jones opens with the classic temple scene then goes into a literal college lecture. These movies are (or will be) classics, in part because they don't oversell themselves; the action is something to be anticipated rather than something that never stops going.
The heroes, as likable as they may have been in their own movies, all became huge egotistical pricks for no more reason than a plot point (Tony Stark already was one, and oddly enough, he was the only character I liked). Yeah yeah, Loki was making them jerks so they'd fight each other instead of stop him and whatever he had planned.I get it, and he did a pretty good job of it. The closer we got to the end, the more I was rooting for Loki and his inexplicably literal Giant Space Fleas from Nowhere (I know, they're actual characters from the Marvel comics, and the trope doesn't directly apply; too bad).
Now, about this Loki guy, I was rooting for him, but he sucked just as bad as the rest of the movie. He had a silly hat and some scepter thing, decided to subjugate humanity, and pick a fight with the Avengers all because some bigger villain decided to give him said silly hat and scepter thing because he wanted to subjugate humanity (sure, Loki has family issues with Thor too, but family wangst doesn't automatically equal good character motivations). We only find out about the bigger villain in the stinger after the (really really long) credits (on top of an already really really long movie) because they're saving the real reason Loki decided to subjugate humanity (because some other, bigger villain wanted to subjugate humanity) for another sequel to what is already a sequel to five other movies because Marvel really just wants your money.
I get it. Marvel's plan for the movie was ambitious. Make a bunch of movies and have them all feed into one giant sequel with a bunch of characters and set pieces so they can make more money. And they succeeded! They made a movie with all these characters and it made tons of money and are now making more movies with these characters to make even more money! That all doesn't mean the movie was good, though; with all the hype they had built up around this franchise, the movie could have been worse than even I've been saying it was and Marvel still would have made enough money to justify all these sequels.
