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REVIEW: The Avengers (2012) Worst Action Movie of the Decade – ManlyMovie

REVIEW: The Avengers (2012) Worst Action Movie of the Decade

Runtime: 143 Mins
Rated: PG-13
What To Expect: I’ve been told this is the worst review for a movie ever written, so I’m bumping it back to the top, see what you think

If you look at the description of this movie, its referred to as an ‘action’ movie.  Ok then, I’m going to review it as one:  This is the worst action movie of the year and this decade.  Probably.  I say probably because I haven’t seen the latest Paul Anderson Resident Evil movie, which is likely the reigning champion.  But I’d rather get stabbed in the eye with with rods of uranium than be witness to that, for all the movies I defend, I do have taste.  The Avengers is the third in a series of feature length toy adverts (The first being Captain America and Thor, two business ventures filling the dual role of trailer and figurine tease).  It is a 143 minute sales pitch created from an IBM processor, a computer generated promo that allegedly cost $220,000,000 to make.  I question that number, especially considering how this movie is, techically, an animation.  And animations are cheaper to make.  I think they lied about their budget, a cheap tactic nowadays to create placebo hype and put critics on notice.

Story matters, so the critics tell us, and the critics raved over The Avengers.  What is the story?  Why, it’s about a threat to Earth in the form of a horned alien coming in through a hole in the sky.  This threat will be dealt with by a top-secret group:  The Avengers.  The group is kept secret, of course, by hiring discontented yet nonetheless internationally recognisable characters, who make the FBI most wanted list look anonymous.  Such as a man in an flying suit who loves TV-Time.  This inconspicuous group hold their clandestine meetings on a flying aircraft carrier the size of New Zealand.  Now you might wonder two things (Or, you might not, given todays hip movie-going audience).. a) Is a flying aircraft carrier the best place to conduct inconspicuous and secretive DEFCON affairs, and b) Exactly what use does a flying aircraft carrier serve, anyway?  Is it up there with the floating boat-carrier?  Maybe this is the prize collectable this Christmas.  

The story is actually non-existent.  Even less so if you haven’t seen Thor or Captain America.  It’s comprised of three acts: A 10 minute first act, where the enemy appears, a 15 minute third act where he is disposed of and 120 minutes of product placement serving as a second act, where the enemy is curiously absent.  Did I mention that this movie has Chris Evans, the most wooden actor outside a Joseph Gordon Levitt audition?  Or horrible phoning-it-in from all involved?  Mind you, many an action movie flunks its lines then comes back with what it promised in the first place: Killer action sequences.  Incredibly, the action in The Avengers is worse than the story.

The final 20 minutes, which probably have more CGI than the entirety of The Phantom Menace, are an assault on the senses.  I defy anyone to immediately recite scene-by-scene what happens at the end of that movie.  There is so much artificial shit being thrown around on the screen that it amounts to an incoherent, vomitous mess.  No time is allowed to savour well executed individual set pieces, because there are no well executed individual set pieces.  The barrage of vacuity happens so fast in the hope that you won’t notice.  If your idea of good action is a shit load of black smoke in front of a shit load of green screen, have at it.  To insure the idiots don’t go home unhappy, some riveting dialogue is inserted, all two words of it: “Hulk, smash”.  In order to make sense of any of this; whether it’s fighting on a flying aircraft carrier or defeating a giant polygon-projected beast that has appeared from a hole in the sky – you’d have to slow the movie down to 1/3 of the speed its played at.  The mess at the end of this movie actually reminds me on Call of Duty without a control pad.  Remember that Godzilla movie from the ’90s that was critically savaged?  Same (shit) as this critically heralded finale, only its execution was infinitely superior.

This baked turd is modern ‘action’, for the hip audience above lowering themselves to the likes of, say, Universal Soldier.  See, we needed to move on from silly garbage with Stallone and Co, with poor acting and no story.  Those movies were stupid.  Get with the times, man!  We need progressive and thought-provoking shit like The Avengers.

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