An Untimely Review of The Avengers

***Spoilers lurk below...and a little self-indulgence and nitpicking. Proceed with caution.***

I finally, finally, saw The Avengers. My parents saw it before I did, and they're officially non-cutting edge senior citizens. The truth is that I'm only about 4% cutting edge, 36% obsessed with vintage times gone by, 48% keeping my head above water, and 12% I have no idea what I'm doing. (Or is it 12% keeping my head above water and 48% I have no idea what I'm doing? It probably depends on the day.)

Now that I've completed that little heart to internet, here is my review, or more precisely, here are my observations, cheers, and jeers in list form. 

• Overall I highly enjoyed The Avengers and was sufficiently entertained. Director Joss Whedon is pretty much a genius in my opinion. 

• The action was well-tempered with hilarity. Even the cheesy jokes mostly worked. Side note: I tend to laugh alone in movie theaters. I don't know if I get more into the movie, if I'm "getting" a joke that isn't there, if I have a great sense of humor, or if I have a misplaced or terrible sense of humor. All I know is that it's a frequent occurrence that I'm the only one laughing.

• Although Samuel L. Jackson is known for his scarier characters, he has very sad eyes (or eye in the case of The Avengers). 

• I did not like Nick Fury's little sidekick Agent Hill. She was stiff and uninteresting. 

• What in the world was Pepper Potts (Gwenyth Paltrow) wearing in her first scene? Hole-riddled cutoffs? It was an odd, trashy costume choice.

• Jeremy Renner did a great job playing a collected, unflinching Hawkeye. I wanted more. More! I'm sure I'll get more of the same when Renner plays the lead in the new Bourne movie.

• Shockingly Scarlett Johansson was great in the first half. (Black Widow's manipulative skills and her hand-to-hand combat were impressive.) But in the last half she lost steam, and her acting felt forced and clunky. It was especially hard to take her seriously when she's shooting her tiny pistolas during the epic battle of carnage; but that's hardly her fault. 

• I have loved Mark Ruffalo for a long while now. But seeing him in The Avengers (as the best Bruce Banner to date) with some grey hairs and being science-y and charming made me remember that I want him to have my babies. Side note: Did you notice that he has a facial twitch? I'm guessing is has something to do with the benign brain tumor he had removed in 2002.

• Thor grew on me in The Avengers, which I'm surprised yet pleased about. I hated the movie Thor.

• I love Tom Hiddleston's face as much as I love his character Loki. (Loki was practically the only good part of Thor.) 

• Is it me, or did the bad guy at the end look like a mix between Hell Boy and Red Skull from Captain America? Was it supposed to be Red Skull somehow? I'm just not willing to dive into comic lore to find out.

• I was delighted by Harry Dean Stanton's hilarious cameo. (He's the security guy that saw Banner fall from the sky.) He was the dad in Pretty in Pink, and he's in one of my favorite, super cheesy, Christmas movies, One Magic Christmas. 

• I think the waitress at the end will return sometime as Captain America's love interest. Side note: Her name is Ashley Johnson and she played Chrissy Seaver, the baby sister, in Growing Pains. And now my life has come full circle.

• I'm pretty sure Agent Phil Coulson is still alive. Severely injured, but alive. There's a good chance I'm wrong, but I like to speculate, so humor me. 1) Fury vaguely says the paramedics "called it" instead of saying Coulson was dead; 2) Coulson said The Avengers needed a reason to unite, so faking his death (after almost dying) would be a plausible plan; 3) Fury dipped the Captain America cards in Coulson's blood, a super creepy thing to do if Coulson is really dead.

• I think Agent Coulson may have had the most pivotal line in the movie when he told Loki that he wouldn't win because it "wasn't in his nature." So gutting and telling of Loki's struggle.

• Speaking of Loki's struggle, I was a bit struck at the theme of sentimentality in the movie. It show's up several times, but the most obvious example is the difference between Thor and Loki. Thor sees sentimentality and compassion as a strength and uses it to reason with Loki; Loki sees sentimentality and compassion at as a weakness and uses it as a source of anger and imagined superiority.