The Avengers was the greatest movie of 2012. Or, so we all heard. Personally, I preferred The Hunger Games. That and TDKR. I remember seeing the Avengers in theaters, though, and really enjoying it at that. One could even say it blew me away. But for some reason, I decided to rewatch it just a couple hours ago, and I'm afraid I've come away with a very different conclusion this time.

Oh yeah, spoilers.

First and foremost is to say that I still like the movie. It's very original, the acting is superb, the characters are a blast, Joss Whedon is a great director, and the dialogue, when it hits, can be very clever.

But I'm sorry to say that it has a great many massive flaws that detract greatly from its overall quality. The greatest among these, I'm sorry to say, is the very thing that most critics are in agreement is its best aspect. When Joss Whedon signed up to direct, he was given perhaps the best deal in film making history. He was dealing with a posse of characters that all came prepackaged with their own backstories and fully-developed personalities. All he needed to do was make them work well as a team, which of course he did.

This sounds like a great thing, but then it hit me that this movie's greatest real accomplishment isn't something that it even accomplished at all. Rather, it was something it found a good way to avoid doing. It squanders every opportunity to develop its characters beyond what we've already seen in their respective films, and then finds itself at a loss for how to fill its massive 2 1/2 hour runtime. So, when we aren't engaged in an action scene (of which there are actually only a select few), characters prefer to spend their time... talking.

Talking about what? Just... whatever.

The film's second act grinds to a screeching halt as Black Widow dryly exposits her backstory, Iron Man uncovers a super-secret conspiracy to do absolutely nothing of any relevance to the plot, and Bruce Banner... exists. The dialogue isn't poor, in fact it can be very funny at times, but it's rarely in service of any end aside from its own.

Take this scene, for example:

It was a perfectly good joke. Good comedic timing, suitably dark without being offensive, the works. It's a fine bit of humor, through and through. But the problem is that it doesn't add anything to Thor's character. Thor might not have been the best of the Marvel movies, but I'm pretty sure I would have noticed if there was anything in the title character about being exactly semi-devoted to his brother. Willing to attack SHIELD heroes to free Loki from a dropship, but disowning him on a whim the second he feels embarrassed.

I think Loki had already killed far more than a mere 80 people by the time that this movie takes place. Thor obviously knew that his brother was a psychopath, so this leaves him the choice to either stick up for him or disown him. He can't sit on the fence like he did here.

It was a joke for joke's sake, and one that Whedon only put in there because he wanted to keep the tone as light as possible, even at the expense of the characters. Whedon's lucky that Iron Man already adapts so well to his half-n-half style of writing, but other characters have no such luck.

Hawkeye, for example, comes away completely without character. He spends most of the film being Loki's Dragon, then has exactly one conversation with Black Widow after turning good, which is wasted on some pseudo-philosophical hokum despite the fact that he's already in desperate need of a personality, and then we never hear a peep out of him again.

All the time this movie wasted on having its pre-owned characters chew on each other could have been much better utilized developing new ones, and while Black Widow and Nick Fury end up at least becoming likable by the time the credits roll, the other new characters all unanimously strike out.

And this ticks me off a great deal, since modern superhero movies are, when you get down to it, all about their characters. If your characters are lacking, then your movie is lacking.

But what about the action sequences? Do they make up for the mediocre comic book plot or the undercooked supporting cast? Not really. The battles may be exponentially bigger than what we see in other superhero movies, but they are no more thrilling or compelling. What this film has in originality, it lacks in common sense. The final battle is an alien invasion of New York, wherein no named characters die, no important questions or plotlines are addressed (aside of one line by Banner), Loki himself is defeated anticlimactically, and nothing in general happens besides constant fighting. Whedon tells a few more jokes, but even these serve little to break up the monotony.

I know this sounds really negative, but again, I really don't dislike this movie. It still has plenty of redeeming qualities that make it well worth recommending, in my eyes, I just think that it has a lot of faults, as well, and that we really should address these instead of glancing over them like they don't exist.