Giant flying sea turtles from space? Really? This is the film that is raking in all the cash; the film that has fan boys drooling over their flabby, donut-enhanced bellies - a film with flying sea turtles from space in it?!?

I know this is hard to do, everyone, but sit back objectively and think about the last forty minutes of this film. Is this giant clusterfuck of shit really quality entertainment? Do you really enjoy watching enormous marine reptiles flying across Manhattan while being ridden by poorly rendered skeletal space monkeys? It’s like Transformers ate The Phantom Menace and exploded this sequence out of its distended rectum.

My hopes were minimal before the release of The Avengers but they rose significantly when every man and his dog (and sometimes his cat) told me how great the film was. However, my rising hopes deflated pretty quickly when the film began. Wait a minute, there’s an alien talking incomprehensible gobbledygook. And he looks like Skeletor! Oh, I know what’s happened. They’ve accidentally hooked up Masters of the Universe to the projector. Dolph Lundgren will turn up in a second in his furry loincloth and then we can fix this horrible, horrible mistake.

But Dolph Lundgren never appeared. You mean this is the correct film? Oh fuck me in the head with a pitbull; this is going to be a long evening!

Perhaps I’m being a little severe. The Avengers is most definitely not a horrible film. It’s just a crushingly mediocre one that has inexplicably been lavished with praise. I’m sorry but a half a dozen decent quips doesn’t make for a great movie.

Following the Skeletor nonsense, the film continues on shaky legs. Some eggheads gather around the film’s MacGuffin (some cube thing that can be used for cheap energy and which can create portals through space) and then everything gets a bit Stargate. The film’s bad guy, Loki, suddenly appears through a portal and proceeds to either kill or ‘turn’ people to his side. The way that he enslaves people is by prodding them with his gnarly space sceptre of convincement. One touch and they’re his drones. It’s all a bit rushed and doesn’t set the stage particularly well.

Thankfully the film improves significantly after this. Once Loki is out in the wild, doing his thing (being a colossal dick is what he does best), Nick Fury gets to assemble The Avengers. Where the film succeeds is in the inter-personal relationships between the heroes. The action scenes are a colossal disappointment and amongst some of the most boring stuff I’ve seen in recent years, but the friction between the protagonists and some of the humour that ensues is really well done.

There’s also some nice moral ambiguity. At the beginning it seems like Nick Fury’s espionage agency S.H.I.E.L.D. is working entirely for the good of man. There’s this crazy guy loose in the world and they want to bring him down. But then we find out that S.H.I.E.L.D. is using the MacGuffin to develop super powerful weaponry against an alien invasion. One can see both sides of the coin. The negative: once you build these weapons, you can’t undo it; they’re always going to be there and they can cause your destruction. The positive: you want to protect yourself from hostile forces; you don’t want to be powerless. So like the atomic bomb; it might have saved us from an even longer war but it also opened Pandora’s Box.

There’s also a thread of hero worship that runs through the film. Agent Coulson (one of Nick Fury’s closest colleagues) is a huge Captain America fan and boasts of having valuable Captain America trading cards. After Coulson gets killed by Loki, Nick Fury shows the bloody Captain America trading cards that Coulson was apparently carrying on his person. This revelation lights a fire under everyone and allows Captain America and Tony Stark to get over their differences and work together as team. We then find out that the cards were never in Coulson’s pocket and that Fury used this as a way of motivating the team. It’s a pretty despicable act but one that is done for the greater good - this lie binds everyone together and allows them to finally act as a team.

I also enjoyed the film’s sense of humour. There are several parts that stand out. The clueless Captain America finally getting a reference because it relates to The Wizard of Oz (Captain America has been frozen in ice and so every modern pop culture reference goes over his head), Tony Stark making a quip about Shakespeare in the park as he, Thor and Captain America battle it out in the middle of a forest, and best of all, The Hulk beating the shit out of Loki.

This last scene was surprisingly hilarious. The rather pompous Loki tells the Hulk that he’s a god and that he won’t be bullied by such a dull creature. The Hulk then grabs Loki like a rag doll and smashes him repeatedly into the ground, calling him a ‘puny god’. The timing and the animation are magnificent.

Sadly this moment of comic relief occurs in the huge clusterfuck at the end of the movie. Towards the end, I really just didn’t care anymore. I just wanted the film over. Whedon tries to inject a bit of pathos by trying to convince us that Tony Stark might die but we all know that he’ll be fine. So therefore we have to endure about forty minutes of poorly designed pixels flinging themselves around. A bit of restraint can be a wonderful thing.

And I have to roll my eyes if I hear another person say that this is the definitive interpretation of the Hulk. Sorry, but as maligned as it is, I still love Ang Lee’s Hulk. As far as comic book movies go, only Nolan’s Batman movies can light a candle to it.

But the people have spoken and the cash registers are bulging. I’m sure there’ll be plenty more Avengers to come, but I doubt I’ll be there.

Why do I keep allowing Woody Allen to do this to me? Time after time I allow myself to get suckered by good reviews and loose talk of a return to form. It’s like I never learnt anything from Match Point. Woody isn’t a complete spent force (I enjoyed some of Melinda and Melinda and Whatever Works raised a few simple chuckles), but you can’t compare any of his recent work to the likes of Manhattan and Crimes and Misdemeanors. And the fact that Midnight in Paris got nominated for Best Picture is pure insanity. Apparently some directors just have to take a crap on the screen to get nominated while others can produce the best work of their life and get silently shafted.

You could argue that the beginning of Midnight in Paris, with a couple of minutes of shots of the spectacular French capital, is a companion piece to the beginning of Manhattan. It’s almost something of a love note. But while Manhattan had a breathless beginning, full of wit and poetry and spectacular photography, this is just a tourist’s view of the city. There’s no real insight. It’s merely an uninspired visual roll call of Paris’ most famous spots.

This tourist’s eye view of a major European city is something that plagued Match Point. You never really felt that Woody knew London. It felt completely at odds with his insider view of New York. And this feeling stretches to Paris. I don’t doubt that he’s visited the city a great many times, but the whole film is a bland kind of touristy wish-fulfillment. Beneath the central conceit of the movie (Owen Wilson, after midnight, can go back in time), there isn’t a thought deeper than, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to go back in time and hang out with Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald for a while...’

Call me crazy, but I expect something with a bit more substance than that when it comes to Best Picture nominees. And most criminal of all, for an Allen comedy, it’s not even that funny. Owen Wilson just lumbers around, doing a sub-par Woody Allen impression.

The only time that the film came close to making me laugh was during the scenes with Michael Sheen. Drunk with his own bullshit, Sheen plays a pretentious, pseudo-intellectual twit who undermines Gil (Wilson) at every turn. He’s so casually rude and tactless that he’s borderline sociopathic. Yet for some reason Gil’s fiance adores this nincompoop.

You know that Gil’s fiance is worthless because everything she wears has some sort of denim. Here she is in Paris, one of the most beautiful, chic cities in the world and she’s wearing a denim dress. How pathetically American of her. Oh, and she has neo-conservative parents.

I can see why Allen makes everyone so risible. He wants us to fall in line and stick rigidly behind Gil. But the characters are so overwhelmingly cartoonish that I couldn’t believe in them.

Firstly, I can’t believe that such conservative parents would want to spend any time in Paris, even if it was just for some business. Surely, given all the ridiculous hatred towards the French (hand me some Freedom Fries!), this should be the last place they would want to be. Secondly, what is Gil doing with such a wretched woman? His fiance talks down to him, she dismisses him at every turn and she’s clearly having an affair with Michael Sheen. The fact that Gil would stay with this woman, and consider marrying her, reflects very poorly on him. He’s an idiot for associating with these people.

But of course, the fact that his present day life is so dismal is meant to make the trip back in time all that much sweeter. It’s part of the whole ‘golden age thinking’ theory that’s presented. Almost everyone is disappointed with the present. Most people think that everything was better at a certain point in the past. It’s the one interesting thought that the film has.

Being even more of a slave to golden age thinking than most, Gil is delighted to be whisked away to a Paris where Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald and Picasso are roaming the streets. But the character is such a fanboy, and has so little to say, that all of his encounters are nothing more than a painfully shallow fawning. There’s so little meat in this film, it’s incredible. It’s like Allen never managed to get beyond the concept.

One of the few things that I could connect to was Gil’s love of city life. He argues that no writer or painter or musician is ever going to create something that’s going to compete with a great city - each corner and each street is its own special art form. And I kind of agree. No film, no book and no piece of music can compete with my beloved London. They just can’t get close.

Eventually Gil recognises the flaw in his thinking and decides to return to the present forever. But this is only because Adriana (Marion Cotillard), the object of his affection, finds a portal to yet another part of Paris’s past. She wants to live in the Belle Epoque. Aghast that she wants to live in a time without penicillin, they go their separate ways.

With this disappointment, Gil finally realises the futility of nostalgia. Yes the present might be painful and unsatisfactory, but such is life. No matter where we are, most of us are destined to want more. It’s human nature. But any depth or melancholy is eschewed for a standard Hollywood ending. Gil breaks up with his horrible fiance and then bumps into a girl he met earlier - a girl who sells antiques at a local market. Of course, the girl is incredibly young and very attractive and they both remark upon how they love Paris in the rain. They then walk off, presumably to enjoy Paris as a couple. The triteness and neatness of this is the final nail in the coffin of a horribly mediocre film. I might go and watch Deconstructing Harry to get rid of the stench.