The Avengers didn't, ergo, genius.



The movie was pretty much what you said it was. When you consider what it could have been, that is a rather spectacular outcome. In all fairness to its makers (some of whom have their fair share of criticism from me on this very site), they started the thing with many handicaps that the Incredibles or Nolan's Batman trilogy (the only other films of this sort I consider peers of the Avengers) did not have to work with.
- The Incredibles was animated, so the verisimilitude bar becomes pretty much non-existent.
- Batman is a cultural icon with universal recognition. Regardless of how big they are within the genre, most people have never heard of the various characters in Avengers, aside from the Hulk, so the movie had establish them and make the audience interested in them. People might have heard the name Captain America, but know little about him, and while Thor is not an uncommon name, those familiar with the original material as opposed to the Marvel comic, would be in for a rude shock (as I was, and expounded upon on this same board)
- The movie was an ensemble of six relatively obscure superheroes, so it had to do all the establishing work of a single action hero's movie, to the sixth power. By comparison, Batman begins, only had to interest the audience in a single character, with most of the work already done.
- The range of powers, origins and back stories of the four main members of the team can barely be contained in the same continuity. It's like trying to team up Snake Eyes, Lion-O, Optimus Prime and Darkwing Duck in the same live action movie. That's four guys from four very different cartoons. These things should not have fit together at all.
- It had the baggage of six previous movies of varying degrees of success to accommodate, not to mention servicing the interests of a small core of fans of the original property. Not that that last issue really matters for commercial success (in fact, recent history shows that the more genre fans despise a movie, the better it does, while those that attempt to adhere more closely to the source material are often panned by larger audiences), but the word of mouth I am getting is that it succeeded to a degree in that respect as well. What is more, some of them are even saying things like "well, it's not perfect, but it is an acceptable adaptation of the comic books and they didn't mess with the characters too badly, even if they did not properly address or service this problem or that personality quirk..." Just getting those people to discuss such a movie in reasonable fashion should be considered a major triumph of psychological warfare in its own right.
- As someone else noted, it was fun. It managed to hit the rather arbitrary sweet spot between being too absurdly cartoonish to take seriously (I am thinking of the first Punisher, and large portions of the Spider Man & Fantastic Four movies), and too serious about an inherently ridiculous premise (X-men, Daredevil, the Hulk movies).

Movies suck as a storytelling media and they are made by people detached from reality, to appeal to the least common denominator. The secret to enjoying ANY film is managing expectations. Somehow, the studio and Whedon accomplished that.