Like a Hulk in a china shop.

I think there are many reasons to be satisfied with the new Avengers movie.  One of them is the mere fact that I now have a new category label since I think writing my own review on things seems like a fun, exploratory sort of thing to do once in a while.  This category shall be called Review From the Top.

Anyway, this is my review of the movie called: Avengers(it will have to be incapably short tonight.)

This movie has had a lot of high expectations riding on it for several good years of already good movie making as it's direct predecessors.  Each of them created the setting for what promised to be a thrilling, potentially complex story of multi-heroic proportions... a promise which was, to my mind, fulfilled in total and then some(with the minor sneak of my favorite villain of all time at the end of the credits!)  I often shy away from the title of fanboy in general but this one has me amped up pretty good.

The good: This movie did a good job of balancing the tremendous disparity of the power levels of all the major players.  From Black Widow(a speck of dust on the super-powered being radar... albeit a very attractive speck of dust?)... to Thor and the Hulk(crushing the radar in their sleep) they all had a valid role to fill which created an actual team dynamic(whenever the team actually functioned as such.)  I can only imagine the challenge this would be to write and Mr. Joss Whedon handled it ever so adeptly.

Every character was humanized quite well, showing their bickering, faulted natures from the get go.  This lead to a very believable personal-divide-that-needed-crossing sort of element that could have put me in the shoes of any one of the heroes in question given my own personal foibles.  My sympathies were drawn out to many of the struggling moments they faced.

The action was pretty much as delightful and exciting as I hoped, my favorite parts being the Hulk and his nearly perfectly executed thrash-about style of existing.  I was one of the smaller number of folks who really enjoyed the first Hulk movie but the intensity of his ferocity was closer to the way I had always hoped to see him than ever before.  All the other action was right up there with it.

Lots of good comedy all the way through.  Stuff that pushed(or smashed) my laugh button with Thor's hammer several times.

The bad: I can't afford, neither do I have the time, to see it as much as I'd like.  I'm sure, once the slightly euphoric feeling still lacing my bones finally fades away a bit, that I can find a few more critical comments to offer about the movie as a whole... but I guess it'll just be stuck in the recesses of my joy-saturated mind for the moment.

Overall rating: 4.5/5 - Not perfection, but pretty stinkin' close.