(Bumped in preparation for Age of Ultron)

Good evening mortals, it is I, Wolverine, here to review the recent super-hero blockbuster movie, starring creations by my father, Stan Lee.

The Avengers have been assembling for several years, through the movies for Iron Man (x2), the Incredible Hulk, Captain America, and Thor. Now that they have finally assembled, all sorts of box office records are falling in their wake as mere mortals watch in droves.

The storyline is your standard super-hero fare: evil enemy (Loki) with a connection (brother) to a hero (Thor) bent on global domination. Nothing is really special there... so why see the movie? Well, the whole draw of The Avengers is the character dynamic.

The characters are drawn together by SHIELD Agent Phil Coulson, at the direction of Nick Fury. At first, they don't blend very well. (They even have a few spectacular scuffles over their differences.) Over time, the characters know that they need each other, as they each bring forth something the others cannot: Iron Man (flight), the Incredible Hulk (strength), Captain America (guidance), Black Widow (cunning), Hawkeye (sight), and Thor (lightning).

No one character steals too much screen time, plus they all share a great balance of comedy and witty dialog to bring The A-Team element to an epic action flick. The pop culture references (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, Marvel comics, etc.) fly by so fast that it's tough to catch all the jokes on a single viewing.

Only one glaring thing really bothered me about the entire movie: At one point, Loki requires a chunk of iridium to put his plan into motion. After crashing a party in Germany to steal it (instead of ordering it for about $850/ozt online), they bring it back to the lab for use. They don't go into why they chose iridium, so I assume wanted it for its high density (about 4x that of iron and 2x that of lead) and catalyst properties. That's all fine and dandy; what bothers me is that a mere mortal scientist is shown in one scene to be lifting this cylinder of iridium and placing it into a device with little effort. A chunk of iridium that size would have been around his own weight! Well, I guess if that's my only complaint, then it wasn't too bad of a movie.

I give The Avengers 5 Loki staffs out of 5. On the XNA (eXplosive Ninja Alien) scale, it gets a perfect 3!