I've not done a review for a while because I've been incredibly busy trying to not be a massive hypocrite and make some good films of my own. However, there's been so much hype about this film that I had to go and have a look.

Before I get into this, I'm not a fan of superhero films as a general rule. I love Kick-Ass and The Dark Knight but that's about it.

The Avengers (Or Avengers Assemble as it's more awkwardly known) is a huge cash in film by Marvel studios (those comic book guys) that has lots of big names and explosions. The story goes that there's some magic energy source from another planet called the Tesseract that we're trying to figure out, when some guy from another planet appears and steals it. Then the Avengers are assembled, take a ride on a massive helicopter, run a few computer scans to find the energy source, then destroy Manhattan to save the world. The usual shit.

As I said before I'm not a big fan of superhero stuff, so I'm not familiar with the back story to pretty much all the characters that I felt like I was supposed to worship when I walked into the film, but the first thing I can tell you is this; while all of the characters are very well acted and interesting, this is very much Iron Man featuring the Avengers. He steals the show and drives the story more than anyone else. This was always going to be an issue when trying to shoe-horn so many big characters into one film, but I thought the balance would have been a little better at least.

The plot is a bit shit. I mean, it's clear and I guess it's always being moved forward, albeit in some extremely slow and cheap ways at times. The largest portion of the film is taken up on a massive flying aircraft carrier, and the only thing moving the plot forward really is a progress bar on a scanner looking for the Tesseract while the rest of the cast dick around punching things.

The final battle was a bit of a let down. The scale was impressive, but there was really nothing different to any other recent action film, and it gets quite dull pretty quickly. There are some stylish flourishes here and there, but they're too few and far between to keep it interesting.

Overall, I guess if you've bought into the Marvel series of films you'll love this because it's the kind of thing nerds have sex dreams about, but from an outsider's perspective, it's watchable but vapid.