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Short answer?

No.

Of course, that depends on how long you’ve been waiting. Since the seventies, when the comics first came out? Since a few years ago, when Iron Man hit the theatres? Or since last summer, when the commercially transparent build-up started to become annoying with Thor and Captain America?

Expectations were high for The Avengers. It had stars, Joss Whedon, and state-of-the-art special effects. What could go wrong?

Nothing. But neither did anything go dramatically different. We do know that Whedon has stuff to say, yet you can walk out of this film and have nothing at all to think about.

The hype machine was in overdrive for this one... and it worked. The movie made a tad over $200 million in its first weekend. What we were promised were a few things. For starters, getting several Marvel superheroes, some of whom had been in successful films, some not, into one film. Then we were promised 3D and CGI, and assumed the film would look fabulous, which it does. Then we were promised, or thought we were promised, a different take on superheroes.

Oops.

The film succeeds in looking good. It also succeeds with some well-placed humour. But story and character remain strictly been there, done that.

SPOILER ALERT (BUT IT WON’T MATTER)

The plot device is the “Tesserac,” which was cleverly introduced in Captain America last year. First the Nazis use it. It has a whole lot of power, although how it has all that power in a tiny cube is never quite explained. Now Loki wants this MacGuffin, as Hitchcock called it, to start some kind of interdimensional war (also never quite explained). The Avengers fight him and—surprise!—save the Earth. Thank Goodness!!! For a long while during the movie, I thought that the Earth was a goner.

Fortunately, all that’s a goner is our mass culture.

The rest is comic book plotting. As happens in almost every comic where superheroes are brought together, there is an initial misunderstand leading to a pointless battle. This also happened with Iron Man and Thor. All either hero had to do was stop and ask a question.

But nope. First gotta slug it out. Why? Because that’s what comic book superheroes do!

Then we go on SHIELD’s nifty airborne aircraft carrier, and it almost crashes in an attack, but doesn’t. Then, for about forty minutes, there is a big battle where the enemy is defeated and the Earth saved.

There are certainly funny points that play with the genre. The script has some funny lines. The Hulk has a lot of fun with Loki, flopping him around like a doll. But just before that, when told he should smash things, the Hulk grins. Pardon me, but in the movie version of the Hulk, he is a dimwitted angry beast who just wants to be let alone. When did he get intelligence? When did he become a team player? Is he in line for corporate Vice President?

The Hulk’s sudden turnaround doesn’t make much sense, but thankfully, we’re given little time to think about it. And that’s about it for character development—or anything vaguely interesting. There were by-the-numbers speeches from Captain America about working together. That worked for him as a character, as he is the one Avenger used to following orders. That doesn’t explain how he becomes so good at giving orders: his character is a seasoned soldier, yet he only had very limited battle experience (and not much of it as a team player). Remember? He went into battle and got frozen pretty quick into a Captainsicle.

Yes, the film is very well acted. All the leads come off well. But they have little to work with that isn’t smashing stuff or banter. A few of the exchanges are downright dull. Perhaps the long chat Loki has with his inter-dimensional bad-guy friends contained an explanation, but it’s hard to say because my mind kept drifting.

In the end, The Avengers is a clever blockbuster and nothing more. It lacks the heart of, say, Spider-man 2, which had two tragic stories at its core. Let’s hope the next superhero offering has more heart—but I won’t hold my breath.