I was just listening to this week's Slate Culture Gabfest podcast and was surprised to hear that their first topic of conversation was The Avengers. The three cohosts can be quite snobby, but they do sometimes love populist stuff (all them flipped for The Hunger Games, to give one recent example).
Sadly, all three gave The Avengers mixed to negative reviews. Even more sadly, one of the hosts is Dana Stevens, Slate's film critic, so that's another rotten tomato coming down the pipeline in the near future.
You can pretty much guess what they said -- while they liked the humor, said it was well made, liked Hiddleston, and liked Ruffalo, they bemoaned how big and loud and expensive it was, bemoaned the superhero genre, said it was too familiar and too like Transformers, etc.
What's interesting to me is that once Stevens' review comes in, 4 of the 9 negative reviews on RT will be by women. I usually think stuff about traditional gender roles is 90 percent BS, but I wonder if the film does play better to men somehow? Maybe it's the lack of major female characters to relate to? Or is their something essentially "boyish" in comic book heroes fighting each other?
It's too small a sample size to truly judge if this is the case, but considering the vast majority of reviewers on RT are men, I found it unusual that almost 50 percent of its negative reviews will have come from female critics.
Of course, this also means that poor Dana Stevens (who doesn't like superhero movies in general but is otherwise a strong critic) will be subjected to lots of nasty misogyny of the "get back in the kitchen" or "who did you screw to get this job" variety in the RT comments section. Sigh.