Marvel's The Avengers Review: The Superhero Story Stabbed Full Of Steroids

Marvel’s The Avengers (a.k.a. Marvel Avengers Assemble in the UK) is the summer popcorn-movie laced with a heavy dose of testosterone instead of butter.

It’s the superhero story stabbed full of steroids.

It’s like Hollywood stole every syringe from L.A.’s rehabbing rock stars, heisted all the Botox out of Beverly Hills, and swiped the human-growth-serum away from all the WWF wrestlers and used them to pump up the Marvel comics crew.

There haven’t been this many flexing pecs, rippling thighs and bulging biceps on one screen since Stewie on Family Guy injected bodybuilding-dope in his butt and got buff.

And I’m only talking about the muscles on Scarlet Johansson’s bod.

The Incredible Hulk’s been souped-up on the soup and he’s meaner and gamma-greener than ever. Thor’s been working out at the gym with Iron Man, Hawkeye’s been pumping major iron, and Captain America’s been Bowflexing his red-white-and-blue ass off. Only Nick Fury looks like the dude’s been hitting the Big Macs at McDonald’s instead of the barbells at 24 Hour Fitness. All in preparation to fight the invasion of badasses from Thor-land who plot to enslave Earth and whup some S.H.I.E.L.D. booty and throw the whole world into a master disaster, or some summer-movie Hollywood wackness.

The movie’s as souped-up and supersexy as the superheroes. To keep the peace, Nick Fury, director of S.H.I.E.L.D., enlists his pals from the Marvel universe to pop a cap on the Asgardian villain Loki, who’s trying to subjugate our world to an alien race.

Expect to hear Shakespeare In The Park? Not!

Expect to see violence.

Expect to have your eardrums blasted.

Expect a logical story and you’ll be scratching your head for 143 minutes.

If you haven’t seen the other Marvel movies, if you skipped The Incredible Hulk, if you passed up Thor, if you dozed and snoozed halfway through Iron Man 2 or went to see Bridesmaids instead of the Captain America flick, you will be lost, dude.

But if your nerd-addiction drove you to sit and salivate through the slew of Marvel movies multiple times, and is ready for the superhero Dream Team come true?

Bring it on.

Director Joss Whedon (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and the writer of Cabin In The Woods) has turned the Marvel comic books into a $200 million movie mash-up. The script zips from one scene of tag-team fighting and uncaged mayhem to the next, like somebody’s flipping channels on their cable remote. The troop of unlikely superfriends has to battle nonstop against not only armies sent by The Other, leader of a demon race, to keep them from opening a portal above arrogant billionaire playboy Tony Stark’s new Manhattan tower, but also Tony’s urge to eat grilled shawarma, the Hulk’s urge to rampage, and Thor’s urge to beat everybody into submission with his hammer. It’s civil war among the super-dudes. In the end, our heroes’ dilemma comes down to stopping a nuclear weapon launched at downtown New York, just as the wave of extraterrestrials descend on Earth.

Everybody in the cast comes decked out in body-suits and ready to rock.

Robert Downey, Jr. continues to rip it up as Iron Man, and to bring his hottie charm as Tony Stark. Gwyneth Paltrow’s back in designer high-heels as Pepper Potts. Dr. Bruce Banner/The Hulk is now played by Mark Ruffalo, since Ed Norton from the original movie decided to go all M.I.A. So Dr. Banner now broods elegantly a ton more, and the Hulk now looks like Ruffalo while he smashes everything to smithereens. As Thor, Chris Hemsworth is a god of thunder one minute, and a long-haired brosky stoner the next.

In this movie, that works. Chris Evans plays Captain America so damn All-American that you want to stand and salute when his character’s on-screen. Some of The Avengers’ best scenes are his, as the Captain tries to adjust to the off-kilter reality of the modern world. Scarlet Johansson is curvy and hot and outrageously foxy as Black Widow, and if she did anything else outside of pose naughtily I was too hypnotized by her skin-tight outfit to notice. Samuel L. Jackson plays Nick Fury like he’s Shaft with an eyepatch. And why Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye is in the movie I have no frickin’ clue.

Think the characters are just a brain-dead excuse for the CGI guys to bust out the special-effects, the pyrotechnics, the interplanetary spaceships and the fanboy-pleasing stunts? No sh*t, Sherlock. But the stunts kick fu*king ass. And the Hulk especially will bombard your brain and your inner geek with his Surround-Sound grunts and roars. Everything you see in The Avengers is eye-popping eye-candy. These Marvel movies are a total smackdown approach to the whole comic book caped crimefighter universe. And even when the tranquilizer-tipped arrows and blue mind-control rays are flying around and sh*t, and the plot is a mind-number, somehow or other you feel the love, and you really feel the fate of the whole world is at stake.

What’s at stake is also the future of the caped-crusader superhero movie.

How do you get bigger than this? How do crack heads with any more action-heroes, invite more villains to the throw-down, explode any more buildings, blow more cities sky-high, or get any more pumped-up when you’ve been mainlining this much movie testosterone?

Cuz if you recall what happened to supersize Stewie on steroids in Family Guy?

His muscles became incredibly loose. And flabby. And turned super-Stewie to supersize crap.