As a big marvel fan i first was very sceptical about this movie, could it be as good as they promised? My answer is yes and this could be a start of something beautiful. Actionpacked from beginning to end with an outstanding cast and in particular Tom Hiddleston as Loki is unforgettable. Also Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner delivers. All of the origin stories were already made so they didn't need to introduce all of the characters what really helped keeping the movie at rollercoaster speed. Josh whedon really did a good job keeping the story watchable with so much going on but you never get lost in the story. Special effects are one word "wow" especially the Hulk as he unleashes destruction all around him. The epic fight between the Hulk and Thor also unforgettable and without any spoilers the climax of the film in new york city is amazing. By reading reviews on other sites i was stunned how many people gave the movie a bad review because of the bad acting, bad story and all of the cliches it has. People it's loosely based on marvel comics, without the cliches there wouldn't be marvel, yeah there are good guys and bad guys, yeah it lacks emotion but do we want to see that in this kind of movie? And yeah the story is about a villain that wants world domination. Get over it and just enjoy a great superhero movie, and just can't wait to see part 2 age of ultron.

As a completist, I'm forced to type up something about "The Avengers". Here goes. It's big, it's fun, it's bright, it's exciting, it's funny. There. All done. Hmmm...that doesn't seem complete really.

The most compelling characters are the Hulk and Iron Man. The Hulk is great here. But, and this is going to earn me zero comic book geek points, I find Ang Lee's Hulk monster more appealing. In that movie, you can knock him on his ass and shoot him up. He takes a second or two to shake it off and then he comes back for more. The "Hulk smash" scenes in that movie are intense and real. In "The Avengers", he's just another indestructible super-thing. Mark Ruffalo's Bruce Banner character is much preferable to Eric Bana's, though.

Robert Downey Jr. is once again perfect as Tony Stark. He wisecracks and outsmarts plenty here and is the one who holds the whole thing together.

Captain America seems a bit under powered being that Thor is effectively a god. They try to add a superpower for Cap with the shield, but he's relegated to fighting with the other second-tier Avengers crew. Speaking of Thor, he misses out on a lot here. Like Superman, he's just too powerful.

For as many characters as there are, everyone has their moments. The story does feel a bit under told, but the movie is so viscerally exciting and bombastic that the lack of clever or emotionally impacting moments can be forgiven. This is an ideal summer blockbuster.

The culmination of Marvel's four-year, five-picture master plan is, puzzlingly, both as good as I'd hoped and a mild disappointment. It excels at playing up the larger-than-life aspects of the story, from the testy initial relationship between heroes and the looming magnitude of the threat they're called together to face. Such moments are dispersed liberally, perhaps once every five minutes, and they're an effective method of keeping the audience on the hook for the duration.

What's missing, at least from where I sit, is a measure of substance or depth behind those fireworks. Robert Downey Jr. is again excellent in his nuanced interpretation of the paradoxical Tony Stark, and Mark Ruffalo might just be the best Hulk ever to grace the silver screen, but by comparison the rest of the cast feels quite thin, shallow and (for lack of a better word) cartoonish. Captain America, for example, wears a completely different personality than he did in his solo picture, and never feels quite right as the commanding field general he's presented to be. The most intriguing aspect of his character, an emotional detachment from modern culture, is barely even mentioned. He, and the rest of the team, feels like a suit of armor with a few good one-liners, not a living, breathing human being. That's a trap that was mostly evaded in the stars' preceding solo shots, so it's a shame to see it tripped here, especially given the amount of time and effort that was expended to define each individual's motivations.

Those nitpicks certainly aren't enough to stop me from enjoying the closest thing we'll ever get to an all-splash-page crossover mega-event on the big screen, but they're also irritating enough to keep tickling the back of my mind while the next set of fuses are lit. It's a herculean effort with some truly great rewards, but not the picture-perfect ensemble masterpiece it would have you believe.

The Avengers is a dream movie come true for superhero fans with its group of extremely talented actors and epic champions, to create an action- packed movie with hilarious banter laced in between scenes. I love how each of the actors and actresses has portrayed each of the roles they were given.

Definitely the greatest superhero movie of all time. Marvel has set the bar high with this one and so far, they're doing a good job of keeping up with that despite not being able to raise it higher!