Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans in Marvel’s The Avengers. (Zade Rosenthal/Walt Disney Pictures)

A glowing blue cube powerful enough to destroy the world is stashed away in an industrialized briefcase. The luminescent Tesseract is the object around which good and evil battle in Marvel’s The Avengers, but it is also a symbol of the varieties of geekdom that Joss Whedon lures into his world. There’s something here to entertain the comic book collector as well as the contemporary Hollywood fan boy. But the references go deeper, and the similarity to a glowing briefcase in the film noir Kiss Me Deadly is just one way the movie draws in a certain kind of movie buff.

As Whedon lays bait for the consumer, the script lays bait for its villain. Loki, brother of Thor, is played by Tom Hiddleston, who along with Chris Hemsworth is reprising his role from Kenneth Branagh’s widely panned Thor. The villain himself is bait, the catalyst for Nick Fury to corral the various superheroes that make up the titular assemblage, and Fury and Loki alternately try to direct the individuals to work together or to fall apart. Are they in fact stand-ins for directorial approaches? They both use their means to manipulate the Avengers; Loki immediately takes the heart out of Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who barely gets to establish a personality before he becomes Loki’s minion; Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) tries to get these sometimes oversized physiques and universally oversized egos to work together. Loki can be seen as an ineffective Branagh, while Jackson is the unifying American Whedon. Can’t we get along?

Mark Ruffalo as the third guy to play the Hulk. (Zade Rosenthal/Walt Disney Pictures)

A big budget superhero movie with an ensemble cast of big Hollywood egos has the potential for big disaster. But even if Whedon’s Avengers is no masterpiece, it achieves something more than just a competent wrangling of diverse comic book stories: it manages to keep Hollywood egos in check. Nearly every character comes from a previou Marvel screen adaptation, but even if you haven’t seen them all, Whedon insists this adventure stands on its own. I’ve only seen the first Iron Man, but I never felt lost, and script elements that fill us in on character’s histories didn’t feel like gratuitous exposition.

Robert Downey Jr. reprises the smart-alecky, dry humor of Tony Stark/Iron Man, and he brings along his assistant-significant other Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow, whose unusually ruddy complexion is perhaps a consequence of her unfortunately suggestive name). The cast play their parts well, but most of them are limited—they are, after all, comic-book characters, and their range is only as good as their writing. Renner’s Hawkeye (not to be confused with Alan “Oh my God it was a baby” Alda) may be the worst-served here—the difference between his persona under Loki’s spell and out of it barely registers with this efficient targeting machine. The most intriguing member of the team is the brutal and conflicted Hulk. Mark Ruffalo’s aw-shucks sensitive guy makes him a perfect Bruce Banner, a man who may have a brilliant scientific mind yet is unable to control his emotions. The secondary roles hold some surprises which may mean little to the target audience, but a certain generation of movie geek will get a kick out of seeing Jenny Agutter and Jerzy Skolimowski get billing, and will be happy to see a senior character actor whom I won’t reveal get his due.

Scarlett Johansson. (Zak Rosenthal/Walt Disney Pictures)

The direction of actors in a superhero movie is not to be taken lightly, and Whedon’s imprimatur can be seen in his villain. Hiddleston fills the role of bad-guy-with-a-British-accent well, but you only have to look as far as Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea to see an actor who is more histrionic as a bored husband than he is as a demi-god with the power to end the world as we know it. Maybe he lets the scepter act for him.

The obligatory spaceship is a constrained and effective set piece, but the movie saves the world’s best set piece for the final act: a Manhattan as it might have been envisioned by paranoid schizophrenics, its skyways teeming with horrifying machines that look like skeletal sea monsters, laying waste to skyscrapers and one of New York’s most elegant landmarks. It’s impossible to create movie disaster in New York without raising specters of 9/11, and the big budget teamwork espoused here recalls a brief time when America was united in a single cause. The Avengers is neither a hard slog nor a life-changing epic, but in the battle of competent summer entertainment, its mission is accomplished.

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The Avengers
Written and directed by Joss Whedon
Story by Zak Penn and Joss Whedon, based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
With Robert Downey, Jr. Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Hemsworth, Jeremy Renner, Samuel L. Jackson, and Tom Hiddleston.
Running time 142 minutes
Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of big explosions, witty superhero repartee and Hulk smashing.