'Marvel's The Avengers' is marvelous

A Norse god, a World War II veteran, a modern defense contractor and the green-skinned star of a 1970s television series -- that's a lot of superheroes to pack into one movie. More important, that's a lot of fanboys to please.

Luckily, writer-director Joss Whedon is one -- a fanboy, that is, though he also does a superheroic job of compressing several summer blockbusters into "Marvel's The Avengers," a splashy, flashy, pass-the-popcorn extravaganza. This is a movie that knows and deeply loves its audience, but it's funny, smart and good-natured enough to please the rest of us, too.

With its classically hokey plot involving an alien army and a power cube called the Tesseract (Zak Penn, of Syfy's "Alphas," co-wrote), "The Avengers" isn't trying to break new ground. The payoff is watching four appealing actors don their costumes and have fun with each other, and Whedon gives you nearly 2 1/2 hours' worth. Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man rules the roost with his one-liners; Chris Evans shines as his polar opposite, the earnest Captain America; Chris Hemsworth, as Thor, roars his Beowulfian lines with good humor; and Mark Ruffalo makes a nerve-racking Bruce Banner, though his crude Claymation transformation into the Hulk is a disappointment compared to the film's other kabillion-dollar effects.

That easy, breezy attitude, and Whedon's snappy direction (which livens up overly familiar sequences like the Manhattan-wrecking finale), are what make "The Avengers" such a crowd-pleaser. A hermetically sealed comics collection might be helpful, but not required.

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