I enjoyed The Avengers - it was a fun flick, and I don't regret paying to see it (in plain ol' 2D, thanks). Lots of shiny toys, clever dialogue generously distributed throughout, the expected summer blockbuster level devastation of at least one major American city. It was certainly (far) better than it would've been without Joss' steady hand at the helm. But it wasn't one of the handful of films I've seen that blew my mind so thoroughly I was ready to go straight back to the box office and pay to see them again *immediately* as soon as the lights came up, like The Matrix or Inception. Not even close. Nor my favorite superhero flick (currently and predictably The Dark Knight, though I hope to see it toppled by The Dark Knight Rises).

I'll try to avoid spoilers, but there be blasphemy ahead...

Maybe the core problem is I'm just not a Marvel guy. I've never been exclusively DC, either, but the collection I've slowly accumulated since the mid-80's definitely skews in that direction and all of my favorites (Batman, Green Arrow, Watchmen, Sandman, etc.) have been DC. Don't think I own a single book featuring any character from this movie, either individually or as the Avengers. I *have* seen most of the Marvel flicks building up to this one over the last few years (except for Thor, more about which later, and any of the various incarnations of the Hulk, ditto).

That means some of the scenes aimed directly at the Marvelphile audience just didn't do much for me, starting with various permutations of "Who would win if character x fought character y?" Some characters I could've done without entirely - neither Hawkeye nor Black Widow seemed to fit in with the rest of the superpowered crew (though perhaps she was worth keeping if for no other reason than her kick-ass solo intro scene). At the other end of the spectrum, I don't care for either Loki or Thor. Are they genuinely gods, and therefore in such a wholly different league that trading blows with/alongside guys in spandex is just silly, or not? Of course, my hands-down all-too-brief favorite single moment in the flick, the one I'll be jumping to and savoring repeatedly on DVD, goes straight to that exact point with a huge laugh, but it doesn't make any damn *sense*. Wouldn't have expected to come out of the flick a Hulk fan, but here I am.

And who is this Coulson guy, anyway? Does he have a long comic history, or is he just a recurring minor character created for the recent run of Marvel movies? None of the hero characters seem particularly close to him until 2/3 of the way through, when he abruptly becomes very important to all of them.

Which kinda brings me home to my main point. If you didn't know going in that this was Joss' flick, I'm not sure you'd know it coming out, either. There's the clever dialogue (and some clever non-verbal moments as well), but there wasn't one line that'll be going into my tag file alongside all of the Buffy/Firefly/Serenity ones. Ok, maybe one - "I'm always angry".

I was entertained, but never really *cared* about any of these characters - when the inevitable heroic self-sacrifice was made, it wasn't a surprise and it didn't hit with a fraction of  the impact Wash's "I'm a leaf on the wind" had in Serenity. Maybe it's not fair comparing Joss' handling of his own characters, to whom he carefully introduced us over many hours of episodic TV, with what he was able to do in just two short hours with someone else's. Then again, Dr. Horrible is only 42 minutes long, and unmistakably "Jossian". I went to the theater not to see The Avengers, but a Joss movie, and in that left just a wee disappointed.

So hooray for Joss. Seriously. He made a solidly entertaining big-budget action flick, managing to simultaneously please both comic geeks and mainstream audiences, while raking in the only kind of accolades that mean anything to Hollywood - big box office numbers. Here's hoping he uses whatever leverage that gives him to go back to telling us more of *his* stories, in *his* worlds, the ones we all loved him for in the first place, on any size screen. Or stage. Hmmm...