The Avengers

For better and worse, The Avengers is less a movie than the world’s biggest collector’s issue. Since 2008’s Iron Man, audiences have dutifully stuck around to see the post- or mid-credits bonus scenes, showing the beginnings of the saga to come. Each clip gathered new players and parceled out story teasers. Your ticket to each installment in this Avengers initiative — from Iron Man II to Captain America to Thor — ensured that the next film would be made.

Now that the proofs of purchase have been collected and cashed in, the hotly awaited payoff is The Avengers, the summer’s first big-ticket action movie — and, for a tedious opening hour, a curious disappointment.

There’s no question that writer-director Joss Whedon has managed to make an insanely expensive summer tent pole into something a bit weirder than expected. At its best — mostly in the second half, when the chemistry among the teammates begins to work — the movie brings the Marvel universe to life with some of the character complexity, sharp-witted dialogue and concern for the genre’s mythic underpinnings that mark Whedon’s best work, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer through this spring’s The Cabin in the Woods. To get there, however, the movie slogs through a first half full of the alpha-male bullshit and contrived conflict that Whedon’s past projects either jettison or satirize.

The Avengers‘ closest antecedent isn’t a superhero movie so much as those 1970s and early 1980s Agatha Christie adaptations, such as Murder on the Orient Express. These mysteries came overstuffed with recognizable faces, and their workman tone gave every performer his or her proper due. Picture a Death on the Nile in which everyone is a Bette Davis — an icon clamoring for its own space, story and star billing — and you get an idea of the logjam that is The Avengers‘ exposition.

To wit: Though last year’s Thor indicated that Asgardian trickster Loki (Tom Hiddleston) was hiding out in the subconscious of executive scientist Stellan Skarsgård, we find that he has instead teamed up with an alien armada, called the Chitauri, to wreck the Earth so he can re-establish his kingdom. The means to this end is the Tesseract (big ups to Madeleine L’Engle), an Asgardian artifact that can turn a good man bad, make things explode, and open interdimensional gateways for the alien menace. The stage is set for the heroes to swoop, dash, stomp and charge in to the rescue.

Alas, the assembled Avengers waste most of the angst-y first half squabbling through various manufactured confrontations on the battlefield and in their laboratory. It’s as if one of those Fake Hulk tweets were delivering story notes from the sidelines: “More fight. Want more fight.” So you get more fight. Somewhere, someone must really have wanted to know if Thor’s hammer could shatter Captain America’s vibranium shield.

One reason The Avengers takes so long to find its footing is that it must reconcile the earlier movies’ jumble of looks, styles and tones. Kenneth Branagh’s Thor, with its Maxfield Parrish-meets-Led Zeppelin approach to cosmic warfare, has more in common with the goofy psychedelic pizazz of the 1980 Flash Gordon than with the techno-Dean Martin charms of Jon Favreau’s Iron Man films — let alone the straight-faced jingoism of Joe Johnston’s delightful, retro-futurist Captain America. Accordingly, apart from Jeremy Renner’s underused Hawkeye, Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans suffer the most as the movie splits the difference and settles on Tony Stark’s snark.

But that proves to be The Avengers‘ saving grace. Robert Downey Jr., who leavens every scene he’s in, relieves the ponderousness weighing down the film’s first hour. Whenever his Stark ducks in with a masterful quip or a sharp elbow to the subtext, you feel like you can breathe again. The happiest surprise is Mark Ruffalo, a newcomer to the franchise as the touchy Bruce Banner and his lovable green id (who gets Whedon’s best lines). He brings nerdy charm and energy, along with enough big-screen charisma to wipe everyone but Downey pretty much off the radar. Here’s hoping that he gets a Hulk film with the artistic daring of Ang Lee’s vastly underrated 2003 version.

Whedon knows how to incorporate an expansive palette of characters into a cohesive whole. This time, though, they’re not his characters. He has a remarkable gift for resourceful and tough female characters, for example, but here he has only a couple to work with. Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow gets a killer scene with Hiddleston’s Loki that hints at a weirder, more emotionally spiky film lurking within.

And yet the movie pulls off moments of sheer magic. One long take during the climactic battle covers several different planes of action involving all the principal characters; it has the kind of iconic majesty that defines entire summer blockbuster seasons.

That said, if the 3-D post-conversion is merely inessential, the digital IMAX experience is ludicrous, a lie on a giant screen meant for actual 70 mm film projection. IMAX is supposed to mean 70 mm film — or, at the very least, a 70 mm blowup. What studios and exhibitors are peddling with this lackluster process is the opposite of super and heroic.