Genre: Action/Adventure
Starring: Robert Downey Jr. (Iron Man 1&2)
Chris Hemsworth (Thor)
Samuel L. Jackson (Captain America)
Scarlet Johansson (Iron Man 2)
Chris Evans (Captain America)
Tom Hiddleston (Thor)
Director: Joss Whedon
To
Thomases (boys/men/dude/guys/fellas, in short the majority of the masculine
race)the world over who have said fairy tales were only silly stories for silly
girls, yeah? Here’s to you! This one’s right up your alley. Or memory lane.
Or garage sale. Or charity home. Or your kid brother’s bookshelf.
Or … OR that mouldy old taped-up carton that has carved a nice niche for
itself in a pile of dust underneath your bed that would have your mother in a
flying fit not particularly different from the effect of a random overdose of
gamma radiation – and I’m not referring to the fit that’s entirely Hugh
Hefner’s fault! * Snickering* Oh fine, the pile of superhero comics that
you have sworn to protect with – well, let’s just say I have known guys to
swear unmentionables by unmentionables!
Now, there’s 3D and then there’s
IMAX 3D. I had the entire movie right in my face, and I came away feeling like
I’d sat through the entire production, direction and everything in between, for
this movie. For the first time ever, I truly appreciated the silliness of
wearing very dark recycled shades inside a room to watch regular TV in order to
attain some “movie experience”. Over-rated, I tell you. Except, well, this time
anything but. The experience was AMAZING!!! The adrenaline, the goose bumps,
the thrill, the magic, the oestrogen … Not to worry, I absolutely – and with
all the willpower I could muster – refused to allow this oestrogen fest of
which I so fondly speak, blindside me. Promise.
For those of you unfamiliar with
comic hero semantics, for those who have never understood the obsession with
“boy dolls in plastic capes and stern faces” (putting it mildly) and for those
to whom “marvel” is the 6-letter noun for “that which causes wonder, awe,
admiration or astonishment” or verb for similar situation, (wild guess: by now
you must’ve caught a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel; otherwise…)
you have committed no heinous crime of any sort – well, just a little. For the
rest of you, feel free to skip the next 1000 words . . .
In plain English this is the gist
of it: the bad people took - no, stole - something powerful, very
powerful, very, very, VERY powerful (I am not exaggerating), some sort of
weapon –and you know how something that powerful could be in the hands of bad
people, very bad powerful people. I’ll tell you – nothing good! So, the Mayor
(there’s always one in every superhero comic) gathers a band of good people to
gather a band of powerful, superheroic people (spot the difference?) - by
that I mean they could do Things! Things that regular people quite frankly
can’t do, things that would make you ____ (pray forgive my restraint).
Their job description is of course to find that very powerful weapon and take
it away from the bad, very bad, in fact evil fellas, and then destroy the very
bad evil fellas (VBEF, for the sake of future reference). Or wait, there’s a
word for it, Villain. Ha!
Unfortunately, there’s
plenty my-power-is-more-special-than-your-power (or ego) and there’s plenty
oh-yeah?-let’s-go-outside-after-school-and-prove-it (in other words, beef).
Boys will be boys, I guess! And then the good people start fighting one
another and there’s blood – no, wait Superheroes don’t bleed (now you get the
obsession, in part) – and alladat, and evil almost wins.
Apparently, there is such a thing as Too Much Good! But then, good remembers
why it’s called good. And the superheroes get their acts together and tackle
(I’m seriously putting it mildly) the villains and win. Evil does put up a
pretty good fight which made the win all the more worth it. And earth lives
happily ever after, with a lot of damage and destruction in its wake – covered
by insurance. Of course.
After
the 1000 words . . .
There’s nothing sexier than a
sexy girl doing damage in an action flick. I concur 100% which is why I have
proceeded to steal without permission (forgive the tautology/redundancy) the
exact words of my movie mate. Indeed, there’s nothing sexier than a
slightly-less-sexy-than-usual Scarlet Johannson in a tight (of course!) LBD
decking the bad guys. For a newcomer to the genre of guns and breaking bones
and not-so-newcomer to seduction, girl did good. Very good. Besides that, the rest is as I
said before. You seriously did not skip the 1000 words, did you? Hmph!
Agent Nick Fury of S.H.I.E.L.D.
(pleasantly portrayed as man-in-charge by darling S.L.J.), makes perhaps his
biggest appearance/return in which he’s assigned by the Mayor and some others
at a round-table meet to form a team of superhumans or superheroes. Of course,
we now appreciate the need for the sufferance of all the other WOW and
not-so-WOW Marvel movie retellings of the life and times of each individual
comic superhero.
The Team: Iron Man 1 and 2 (and 3
around the bend, we (I) can’t wait!); Captain America (hot but hopefully no 2);
Thor (while a 2 would be redundant – he could have a kid - we (I) would not be
complaining anytime soon); Incredible Hulk (you gotta admit, working with
something so big and green and ugly tends to clog a few directors’ wheels;
still somewhere out there it’s been done super-successfully FOUR times for
something even uglier and admittedly, smaller, a whole lot smaller, and
probably the same shade of green and far less superheroic – wake up, people!);
Hawkeye (nah, no movie); Black Widow (sexy, but no movie) and a whole bunch of
others … that about sums up the team. The good guys, that is.
The team, (or the Avengers) bands
together to save dear Earth from the evil clutches of Loki (Hiddleston, with a
delicious serving of fluid evil swag, makes us wonder if we skipped the memo on
#TeamLoki – we’re blaming it on Thor’s divine looks, literally!) and his army.
And putting the bias against evil aside, this army was something else entirely!
Well, naturally, seeing as it came from the underworld or was it the skies
above?! You never know with evil, ever-so-cunning …
Now, without getting too much
into the heat of things (I've been called a tease one time to many), I move on
to the reason I started this blog to begin with slash the part where I
constantly get allergies, particularly where it concerns the action genre (save
a few lucky times): BALANCE. The balance between the story and the ‘action’ for
a well-delivered plot. Striking the balance, hitting and scoring where it
matters, maintaining the focus and not putting the story in a position where
its crumbs are carelessly (although with good intent) scattered and the birds
have dinner, and the lost trail has causes the entire plot to end up as
thickening sauce for the witch’s pot. 11 out of 10 times this happens, so I do
beg your pardon if my metaphor is something of an itch.
Knowing where the wisecracks end
and the skull-cracking begins is admittedly, tricky. To holster or to hold? In
this case, balance was intact. The story was not lost. The action was on point.
I didn’t come away feeling that the sole aim was to blow me away with the
latest of ‘stuntsmanship’ in 3D, while dulling my English-speaking brain cells
to numbness. If the plan here was for the entire movie to fall into place
without a series of unanswered questions to an audience that had had no
previous courtship (a mere acquaintance would not suffice except perhaps with
help from google or wikipedia) with at least 3 of the superheroes in question …
nah! That wasn’t the plan. And I say this with conviction. In retrospect
though, I guess they could have gotten away with it, but to what end? As they
say, there’s a difference between being driven in a Ferrari and driving one!
OK, maybe I made that up! Seriously though, if you haven’t, you might
want to do yourself a favour and see all the superheroes in action individually
in order to get a base. A base never hurts. Especially where a heightened sense
of appreciation is your reward!
Which brings me back to the
subject of balance, forgive the digression. We know the beginning. We know the
end. Good fights evil. Good wins. Evil is destroyed. As easy as 1-2-3. So easy
that the difficulty in spitting the same line over and again to pretty much the
same audience over and again paradoxes maximally and of course, rather
sadistically. However, again in retrospect, and this is really tough, having
only recovered from the blindsidedness of all those super sexy abs, beautiful
biceps, too much ego, excess adrenaline, comic relief and all (see what I had
to deal with?), I would say this one was right in the money. According to my
weighing scale, the odds were not tipped in favour of adrenaline-pumped action
against the fine art of story-telling. While the latter was no marvel (last time,
promise), seeing as there really isn’t much to be expected, there really was
hardly much to be desired. Wit and banter strung it along adeptly and made us
very happy. Without stealing from the sense of the movie in and of itself and
still managing to hold us in with a fair share of pleasant surprises, it
worked!
Of course, what good is an action
flick without chemistry? And here’s where I’d hoped to catch Mr Whedon
off-guard: the superhero - damsel in distress saga. However, with the subtle
injection of the romantic lives of the team members throughout the plot, he was
well prepared. It was so delicately inferred that so much as a
less-than-perfect attention to the intimate emotional details and the intent
would be misinterpreted as borderline disinterest/ lack of emotion. Thankfully,
and rather surprisingly, there were no new ‘alliances’. That is, not counting
the palpable egoistic foreplay involving all sides, with a cult-like presence,
the absence of which would have marred the very essence of the plot, leaving us
wanting, wondering, bored and sad, thus rendering it fodder for the joyous
feasting of critics the world over (sad cue, enter Green Lantern). Clearly,
Whedon had a plan: no cliché. And he stuck with it. And we applaud.
On a lighter note, comedy. The
comic relief was totally devoid of comic relief (no pun intended, or maybe
some). And that, in a good way. In other words, it was not the sad excuse to
keep the audience in place on the occasion of a poorly executed plot. The comic
aspect was just that, pure comedy: funny, witty, rib-tickling and
unapologetically funny. There was no such thing as too many wise-cracks. I
daresay the people in charge borrowed from the comical pages of well-performed
Transformers 3 and tailor-fitted it seemingly effortlessly – fluid. Revved up
by none other than genius, billionaire and playboy Tony Stark (aka Downey Jr.
(Sigh! Sigh!)), it was a marvellous (oops!) hit from start to finish!
Amidst all the bickering and
powerplay and gunfight and thrills and chills and all the works, which for 99%
of the entire movie was a pleasure to watch and had us on the edges of our
seats for the most part (I’m thinking that had a lot to do with the 3D+), the
good guys, Avengers and co. (OK, scratch the ‘and co.’) take on Loki and co. (a
HUGE ‘and co.’) in a winner-takes-all battle, kinda . . . and WIN! YAY! Curtain
Call! But first a minute’s silence for Loki, just because evil has never looked
so … good! Speaking of good . . .
Good – ALL THOSE HOT DELICIOUSLY
TONED BEAUTIFUL MEN!!!!!! I am not about to apologise to anyone for my open
declaration of lust!
Evil – One, the tacky coming
together of the team, which turned out to be my dear Whedon taking the no-cliché
therefore no cue music a tad too seriously, but then he fixed that.
Two, the … I honestly found nothing else wrong with this piece of
thrill – oh, except where they tried to make me choose between Thor and Iron
Man, I mean c’mon! I’m still seething, and I still refuse to take sides!
Ugly – in 3 words, The Incredible
Hulk. Although even he managed to look kinda good. Not enough to eat. Not bad
enough to make us puke. Just ugly.
Popcorn: There’s good.
There’s evil. There’s you. Pick a side … in the meantime, we’ll settle for a
victory of sorts . . . in 3D . . .
Scene . . . or Sin? For
those who have committed our previously discussed heinous crime, do the time!
You deserve it! For those whose fantasies have come alive – well, duh! Go get
your glasses already. And if you’re in neither phase, seriously … it would be a
SIN not to see this movie.
For giving us cause to Marvel
(there really is no better word), I’m slamming a 4.9 out of 5 on
this one! I look forward to the competition . . .
See for yourself ... and thank me later!
