The Avengers

“This intergalactic energy cube ain’t big enough for the six of us,” “The Avengers” says with a forceful tone as it struggles to conceal a smile.

Joss Whedon’s superhero movie equivalent to The Travelling Wilburys fully knows how impossible it is to squeeze all of these massive folklore figures into one film. So when the whole serious side starts to cave and just gets silly, Whedon is there with a zinger to run with the moment.

“The Avengers” is a fun and smart movie in doses, one that surprises and dazzles when it isn’t talking your head off.

The plot is nonsensical without the proper training in all of the Marvel films that have built up to this, including “Iron Man 2,” “Thor” and “Captain America: The First Avenger.” But of course everyone has seen all of them, has studied their Easter eggs and been counting their chickens in anticipation for “The Avengers,” so maybe this audience will be unprepared for a movie that doesn’t have winks just to fanboys but winks to everyone paying attention.

For those keeping score, the six Avengers are the 1940s World War II hero Captain America (Chris Evans), the alien-god Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the genius, philanthropist billionaire in a metal suit Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), the literally mad scientist Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and the two un-super master assassins, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson). Their mission is to steal back a shiny blue cube Macguffin thing, the Tesseract, from Loki (Tom Hiddleston), Thor’s demigod brother borrowed from the prequel “Thor.”

When they are first gathered together by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and the spy organization SHIELD, they literally butt heads. These heroes are from different worlds. Their powers combined together make an unholy mix of sci-fi, modern warfare and hand-to-hand combat. But thankfully, the film has fun with their conflicting powers and creates some genuinely memorable and surprising action set pieces. When you’re watching just “Iron Man” or just “Thor,” you get used to seeing Tony Stark shoot rockets out of his ass or for Godboy to whip his mallet around. But here, the hits keep coming as the heroes refuse to fall down, and they make the most of their arsenal of tricks. Iron Man’s tech wizardry really has to prove itself when he’s battling a ruffian from space.

Simply put, it’s a much more balanced film than something like the most recent X-Men movie, where each mutant gets a turn to strut their stuff and the spectacles disintegrate one-by-one as if on a conveyer belt. Whedon uses the gigantic and endless action scenes as more a device to sneak in a few more punchlines rather than a mindless extravaganza of CGI. In ways, the busy, but not completely chaotic camera is reminiscent of the battles in “The Lord of the Rings,” with Hawkeye the substitute for Legolas counting the number of orcs he’s killed.

But it’s quite possible there is more talking in this film than there is actual action. The first hour or so is conversation after conversation of spies approaching superheroes to request their assistance, followed by verbose conspiracy theories and plot points told in Tony Stark’s pretentious pseudo-science. Most of this is done with a straight face, and only Downey and Ruffalo aren’t completely sleepwalking through this dialogue.

Why does so much of this have to be dour and sanctimonious? Whedon proves time and again in quick character jabs, typically by Downey, that “The Avengers” is capable of being witty and engaging. But it’s as if Marvel has instated a quota of being dry and somber. The moments between Downey and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) are as romantically infectious as the best moments in the original “Iron Man,” so why can’t we have more of those? Maybe it can only be interesting 12 percent of the time.

But still, that 12 percent is spectacular enough to make “The Avengers” fun, memorable and less mediocre than most Marvel films.

3 stars