Review: Marvel's The Avengers

The new superhero movie, officially titled Marvel's The Avengers, is unlike anything else in history. Never before have five summer blockbusters been made over the course of four years to set up the characters for one super-blockbuster. Fan anticipation has been intense, ever since IronMan and The Incredible Hulk hinted at the idea in 2008.

Now The Avengers is here, and, in many ways, it out-blockbusters them all.

The crucial element is writer/director Joss Whedon, best known for his beloved cult TV series "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Firefly." Whedon has an affinity for extraordinary misfits and affectionate humor, and a touch for balancing ensembles. This widely mismatched cast starts with the excellent thespians Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man), and Tom Hiddleston (Loki), and touches on the awesome star power of Jeremy Renner (Hawkeye), Scarlett Johansson (Black Widow), and Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury). 

Toward the bottom, there's Chris Evans (Captain America) and Chris Hemsworth (Thor), both of whom were arguably cast more for looks than for personality. Among several other familiar faces in walk-on parts, Whedon has made the sublime choice of shaggy, wounded Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner (and The Hulk), replacing Edward Norton. Whedon then works his magic and makes them all equals. If Downey steals one scene with dialogue, then Hemsworth gets a complementary scene of passionate rage. 

Of the five previous movies, last summer's Thor had the best villain, the impish Loki, and Whedon has effortlessly relocated him here. Loki's new plan is to use the "Tesseract" -- a glowing cube -- to invite evil alien armies to help take over the earth. The Avengers are called upon to stop him, but unfortunately, they don't yet know or trust one another.

Thus we get our very simple theme: all of these outsiders, each given a "terrible privilege," can become something greater by learning to work together. Whedon conjures up some beautiful moments of teamwork in the thick of battle, including one of Hulk slamming a piece of shrapnel into the neck of a giant monster, and Thor hammering it home.

This movie has it all: gorgeously clear action, humor, suspense, and even passion. It's not going too far to guess that no other summer movie will touch it. Yet The Avengers takes place in a dark world of heightened military fear, wherein a nuclear missile is launched as effortlessly as making a piece of toast. Fury admits that he has assembled the team as a form of stockpiling weapons against as-yet-unimagined threats, which ironically is a threat in itself. Oddly, this is quite the opposite of the themes in the two Iron Man movies. Whedon's reasons for treading this paranoid path are ambiguous and slightly puzzling.

However, the world needs its heroes for many other reasons. During their trials they find their true selves, coming away ever so slightly stronger than they were as individuals. And all those misfit audience members -- shy, awkward, uncertain... i.e. most of us -- know exactly what the movie is really about.

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (Blu-Ray Review)

Tom Cruise has had a tough time of it lately. He was once, and for a good long while, one of the top movie stars in the world. Then he started behaving strangely, a bit too often, in public, and he seemed to have lost his clout. And yet, in truth, he has only been demoted to the status of a "normal" movie star. Of his last six films, three of them made over $100 million, and two more came fairly close. On Rotten Tomatoes, four of those same six films have "fresh" ratings. The next step is a movie for former Cruise fans to really love. And I think that Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol might be it.

The previous movie, Mission: Impossible III, directed by J.J. Abrams, was my least favorite of the series. It seemed to forsake all the playful fun in the name of "bigger-faster-louder." Abrams used shaky-cam and his all-peaks-and-no-valleys pacing and came up with an exhausting, forgettable entry. Now animator Brad Bird -- making his live-action debut -- takes over and the result is solid. Bird (The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, Ratatouille) is a great storyteller, with a good grasp of pace, and a crisp, bright tone, and the new movie benefits from his guidance (Abrams remains on as a producer).

In his fourth time out as Ethan Hunt, Cruise takes a serious beating -- he is given two painful-sounding conks to the noggin -- and he appears somewhat humbled. Perhaps his injuries (both physical and invisible) will endear him to viewers a bit more. What's more, Bird and screenwriters Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec (both from Abrams' TV team), make Ethan Hunt part of an ensemble. His new teammates, Jane (Paula Patton), Benji (Simon Pegg), and Brandt (Jeremy Renner), get nearly an equal amount of screen time, though Cruise does get three big visual effects showstoppers.

The action begins as Jane and Benji are assigned to break Ethan (Cruise) out of a Russian prison. He brings an informant with him, and the escape is a success, more or less. Not out five minutes, Ethan receives an assignment to break into the Kremlin and steal certain records. Unfortunately, he is too late, and the mission is compromised; the bad guy has made it look as if Ethan and his team have blown up the Kremlin, reviving the old Russia-vs.-U.S. nuclear standoff.

Because of the trouble, Ethan and his team are now forced to operate off-grid (i.e. "ghost protocol"), and Brandt joins them. They try to nab the bad guy during a transaction for the missile codes and fail, and therefore they must come up with one last-ditch attempt to stop the bad guys from destroying the world. And it involves getting all dressed up for a fancy party!

The plot is, of course, a bit ludicrous, and the bad guys here are pretty much faceless and without personality, but we don't come to Mission: Impossible movies to learn about the bad guys and what they want; all we care about is that the good guys have to stop them by doing insanely complicated things. For example, while visiting the tallest building in the world, in Dubai, it becomes necessary for Ethan to break into the computer room from the outside. So he must scale the towering glass facade, the wind whipping in his ears, and his specialized gloves not working properly.

Another chase occurs on one of those high-tech, high-rise parking garages with ever-shifting elevators and a terrible drop to the steel floor, several stories below. But of course other stunning sequences involve simply holding still, hoping for a miracle, and trying not to sweat too much. In short, this movie is nicely balanced fun, and it offers a wonderful reprieve from some of the dreary and overcooked awards season turkeys.

Note: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol pulled in $200 million in the U.S. alone, making it one of Cruise's top 5 highest-grossing movies, ever. Paramount Pictures released a two-disc Blu-Ray/DVD set on April 17, 2012. I did not receive a review copy, but I will update this review when I get my hands on one.