Captain America. The Incredible Hulk. The Invincible Iron Man. The Mighty Thor. As a kid, I remember watching Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's angst-ridden superheroes, then not much more than a dozen years old, on an umbrella cartoon (because of its limited motion, you couldn't really call it animated) series called The Marvel Super Heroes. Though it was rewarding enough to watch these heroes' early stories play out onscreen, for most viewers, one of the coolest parts of the show was when some other super character would pop in to the storyline unexpectedly, a crossover. Hawkeye, Black Widow, Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch and many others would rear their head, and one imagined that the Marvel Universe was an expansive setting in which anyone could be the recipient of a metahuman power infusion.
What works on the comic page, or on children's cartoons, doesn't always work on the big screen, however. Marvel has spent a lot of creative and monetary capital on establishing their individual superhero stars as the most special and most powerful characters in their respective franchises. Iron Man 2, the weakest link of the interlocking series of films that preceded Marvel's newest release, fails mostly because its star is eclipsed by what feels like an interminable succession of characters with powers as unique as his (or in the case of War Machine, nearly exactly the same as his). In a world with gadget-laden assassin Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), the electric-tentacled Whiplash or even the crafty superspy Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), what makes Tony Stark's Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) so special? As anticipation built for The Avengers, a culmination of Marvel's dream to unite its most recent moneymaking franchises, the film critic in me was going in with a skeptical eye.
