Never have I seen a movie with expectations like this. I mean you are talking about four different mega-high profile movies with four different known comic book characters. And there was a sequel to one of them in there too. This movie has legitamitely been hyped for four years since the scene at the end of the credits in Iron Man. You are talking about juggling all these characters (and the egos of the actors attached to the parts). You are talking about a pipe dream of a movie for fanboys since they picked up any comic book featuring this. You can say what about X-Men, but that was different. They were established and developed within that one movie. These were all established seperately and all revolved around completely different ideals. One was all about ego. One was all about doing the right thing. One was all about mythology. One was all about controlling anger. How in the hell would they be able to put all this together and do it justice? I kept telling myself to just enjoy a popcorn movie short on substance and cool to the eye and I would have been satisfied. I was wrong. They managed to pull off what I thought would be impossible, met the sky high expectations and quite honestly - blew them out of the water. The story was amazing. The action was awesome. The laughs were HUGE . . . . and it wasn't just Downey Jr's one liners. The script was written in such a way that everyone got to be in on it. There were two scenes with the Hulk where the audience was hysterical. The balance between everyone was amazing. They did every single one of them justice. Even bit players like Agent Colson was made to matter to every viewer. I can't remember the last time that I was impressed by a movie. Actually - I can. It was the Dark Knight. This movie didn't have as much broad spectrum substance as that and it's the only thing that keeps me from saying that this is the best comic book movie ever made. But I have no problem saying that this is the second best comic book movie of all time and easily the greatest achievement of hype matching I've ever seen.
Would I recommend it? Duh. I could have kept gushing for pages and basically just forced myself to stop. This movie was excellence across the board and easily the best movie of the year so far.
