‘The Avengers’ is Almost a Genre Masterpiece
By Scott Mendelson
In a film like The Avengers, which brings together strands of several prior pictures into a mostly cohesive whole, it is arguably inevitable that individual pieces will end up working better than the sum of its parts. That the film works at all is almost a miracle, and it’s so purely entertaining and contains so much that works like gangbusters that it’s tempting to ignore what doesn’t work and merely salute the enterprise.