The summer blockbuster season officially begins in earnest this Friday with the release of the highly-anticipated Marvel superhero team-up extravaganza ‘The Avengers’. As we wait for that, now seems like a good time to vote for our favorite ‘Avengers’ hero who will be appearing in the movie.
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For the purposes of this poll, let’s try to limit our judgments about these characters to their portrayals in the existing Marvel live-action movies, and not include any previous incarnations in comic books, cartoons, etc. That might not be fair to poor Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who makes his first appearance in the new film, but I doubt that anybody planned to vote for him anyway (if I had to guess).<\/p>\n
I hate to say it, but I’m actually not particularly excited for ‘The Avengers’. A lot of that has to do with the fact that I was never much into superhero comics as a kid. ‘G.I. Joe’ and ‘The Transformers’ were my thing. I never read an issue of ‘Batman’ or ‘Superman’ or ‘Spider-Man’, and the first time I’d ever even heard of ‘Iron Man’ was when the Robert Downey, Jr. movie came out. The other part of this is that most of the Marvel movies I’ve seen haven’t been very good.<\/p>\n
I like ‘Iron Man’ (more so the first film than the second), and he gets my vote here, mostly for Robert Downey, Jr.’s very fun portrayal of the character. I’ve only seen the first ‘Hulk’ movie with Eric Bana, which obviously was pretty terrible, and a few scenes of the second with Edward Norton (which didn’t seem much better from what I watched). How the Mark Ruffalo version will fare remains to be seen. <\/p>\n
Recently, I made a plan to rent a double-feature of ‘Thor’ and ‘Captain America’, but unfortunately VUDU only had the former available for purchase, not rental, so I only managed to see the latter. The praise that ‘Captain America’ has received from fanboys utterly mystifies me. I thought it was fairly awful.<\/p>\n
I still plan to see ‘The Avengers’, probably in the theater, mainly because I want to support director Joss Whedon. I think it’s about time that he had a big success.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I’ve included all four of the major heroes in the poll, along with some secondary characters such as Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow and Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury. Because I’m aware that a contingent of fans are obsessed with Clark Gregg’s tertiary character Agent Coulson, I’ve thrown him in as well, even though I don’t understand that fixation at all. <\/p>\n
Who gets your vote?<\/p>\n