I really enjoyed the movie, but I felt like the one thing that really could have been better was how Hawkeye was used in the film. All of the characters had been introduced previously in their own films except for him and Black Widow, which sort of makes sense since neither of them is a super hero, but even she had a much larger introduction in Iron Man 2 and was established as a super spy and having awesome fighting skills. All I remember of Hawkeye previous to this film was a brief cameo in Thor where he didn’t even actually do anything, he just had his arrow pointed at Thor. So, great, all the general audience knows about him going into this movie is that he’s a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent that uses a bow.
That’s fine, I can deal with him not having a whole lot of backstory in the universe, but with that sort of disadvantage about having any sort of connection with him from the audience, I felt having him get immediately mind controlled and essentially being a bad guy for the first half of the movie made it impossible to be sympathetic toward his character or even see how he could be a positive for the team since he was actively working against them, albeit against his will, for much of the film. At least Black Widow had demonstrated her spy interrogation ability a couple times, including on Loki, at that point and she was even the one who beat Hawkeye and knocked sense into him.
Even in the last scene, I never really felt impressed by his contribution to the teams efforts. Yeah, he was taking out some of the Chitauri with his bow, but his big hurrah was using an explosive arrow to knock Loki off his rider. Compare that to what the others did. Hulk and Thor each took down a few flying dragons and bashed a bunch of soldiers, Captain America beat up a bunch and helped coordinate the attack and pretected a bunch of civilians. Iron Man took out a dragon or two and guided the nuke into the mother ship. Even Black Widow took out as many of the soldiers and was the one who took out the portal generator. Hawkeye contributed the least by far.
I mostly just felt like he was a complete waste, like he’s the Aquaman of the Avengers and just sort of there because they felt like they needed another non-superpowered member to interact with Black Widow. The least they could have done was give him some moment where he did something that wouldn’t have otherwise happened if he wasn’t there.
That all said, I probably rambled about it more than it really deserves, and that I think the weakest part of the film is that only one of the 8 major players (including Fury and Loki) was underutilized, I think that’s still pretty good.
One very minor nitpick, I would have liked to at least have seen a mention of War Machine akin to what they did with Natalie Portman’s character from Thor with a throw away line. It makes sense that he wasn’t there, since it took place in Manhattan and he appears to be stationed at Edwards AFB in California, but it would have at least been nice to get a throw away line for him on why he wasn’t considered for Avengers or had been and had refused or been rejected or whatever.
On a positive note, I quite impressed with Mark Ruffalo’s performance. I initially wasn’t happy to see that Edward Norton didn’t make the film since I’m generally a big fan of his work and not as much of his and I felt like it might hurt the continuity a bit with a different look and a slightly different interpretation. However, I actually think he did a better job with the role than Norton had in the Incredible Hulk. I’d really like to see him pick up from there. Since Iron Man 3 is the next movie in this set and Stark seemed to take a liking to him, presumably he’ll be a major player in that movie rather than get his own sequel.
