Hulk all the way

About half way into The Avengers, during a messy action set piece, the boringly earnest Captain America (Chris Evans) tells the delightfully egotistical Iron Man (Rober Downey, Jr), “We need a plan of attack!” The Iron Man replies: “I have a plan: Attack!” Suffice it to say that good sense is not one of this movie's many strengths.
The action gets rolling when Nick Fury (a dour Samuel L. Jackson), director of the espionage agency SHIELD, arrives at a secret research facility, where the Tesseract, an energy source of supposedly huge potential, has opened a portal through space. Loki (Tom Hiddleston), the exiled Norse god last seen in Thor, descends through the portal, kills a few men, takes the Tesseract and wreaks havoc on earth. To stop him, Fury assembles the Avenger Initiative with Iron Man, Captain America, Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and the Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson).
Director Joss Whedon, of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer fame, expertly divides screen time between the Avengers. The action sequences, though not brilliant as the recent Mission: Impossible movie, are a comic-book fan's wet dream. The standouts, however, are the scenes involving the Hulk. Whedon and Ruffalo turn the green behemoth, who was portrayed in earlier films as more of a rampaging monomaniac than a superhero, into a person with panda-ish charm. 

The Avengers

Cast: Robert Downey, Jr, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson
Director: Joss Whedon
4 stars

This piece was originally published here