Right, anyone know or even care what a tesseract is?

I won’t bore you with the official translation, but in the world of Marvel comics a tesseract is this flashy cube thing that could provide the earth with an infinite source of power.

Pretty cool, huh?

Only problem is, and you’ll like this, because this thing is so damn powerful there’s a great many n’er do wells who quite fancy a piece of the action themselves.

And who could blame them?

If all you want out of life is to take over the world and enslave humanity or some similar thing, one of these tesseract things would come in rather handy.

So Loki, sort of brother of Norse demi-god Thor and still smarting from being cast out of his sort of home planet of Asgard for an attempted act of mass genocide, decides to get into bed with an aggressive alien race known as the Chitauri.

What do you mean you’ve never heard of the Chitauri? Clearly you need to stay in more and lose that life you must be living.

With the tesseract and an army of alien warriors at his disposal, can anyone possibly stop Loki from taking over the world?

You already know the answer to that one.

Joss Whedon’s supercharged, superhero flick Avengers Assemble carries on this merry and silly way with a slew of familiar faces from both Hollywood and the world of Marvel comics.

And trying to describe the plot of such a superhero ensemble piece would be an act of even greater silliness, so I’ll leave it at that.

Besides, you’ve already decided whether you’re going to see this film or not and there’s nowt I’ll be able to do to change your mind one way or the other.

But I will say that Avengers Assemble is a lot of fun. Admittedly this fun is just about as silly as you can possibly imagine, but that’s kind of the point.

Chief amongst the fun makers is Robert Downey Jr who reprises his role Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man.

Downey boy cranks up his wisecracking shtick to eleven, as anyone familiar with the previous two Iron Man films will be well aware of by now, set against the big metallic noise of another rock ‘n roll soundtrack.

Whether you like Iron Man or not all kind of depends on what you think of Downey Jr himself.

Some might say he’s a smug, arrogant and egotistical maniac, with the character of Stark representing a hyper reality of Downey Jr himself.

Seeing as I identify pretty strongly with a lot of these traits myself, I’m a big fan of the once troubled actor’s wit and bravado and loved every charming moment Downey Jr’s on screen.

It’s hard not to when Iron Man gets all the best lines, though this eventually serves as both Avengers Assemble strongest suit and achilles heel.

Naturally, it’s not possible to have realistic dialogue in this kind of film, so a lot of the interactions border on the ridiculous; especially the incredibly hackneyed and clichéd utterance’s that Samuel L Jackson’s pious character of Nick Fury spouts.

Still, when you’re watching a film that pits Thor, The Incredible Hulk and Captain America into battle odds are realism is not something that’s high on your agenda. So it’s not really fair to judge Avengers Assemble too harshly for this.

Loki and Thor continue their supposed sibling rivalry in entertaining demi-god fashion, with Tom Hiddleston reprising his role as villain with the de facto english accent for american audiences and Chris Hemsworth flexing his antipodean muscles rather convincingly if you’re into that kind of thing.

Scarlet Johansson is Black Widow, the freshly anointed new Bourne Jeremy Renner plays Hawkeye and Luke Evans returns as Captain America to make up the earthly heroes on show, and they all have their fifteen minutes of fame to bask in the glow of some gigantic explosion.

But its Mark Ruffulo turn as Bruce Banner, or at least the green menace he transforms into, that most threatens to steal Downey Jr’s thunder with some suitably reductive one liners.

Whedon has done a decent job of stitching together all these Marvel superhero’s into a single and vaguely coherent storyline.

Chances are you’ve decided whether you like Avengers Assemble before even seeing it though.

Especially if you already know what in Odin’s name a tesseract is.

Jonathan Campbell