Now that phase 4 of the MCU has hit theaters with Avengers: Infinity Warit’s time for me to give my personal rankings on the individual films. Instead of a numbered list I am going to break them down into categories. From bottom to top the categories are:

Bargain Basement

Mid-Grade

Honorable Mention

And

Top Tier.

Bargain Basement:

Let me kick off by saying that Marvel’s Bargain basement movies are still far superior to nearly all of the competition. These films have solid structures, competence, and for the most part achieve their goals. Their failings are usually a tendency to fall into formula over form.

The Incredible Hulk: This film while it hit all the required beats suffered from a bland and uninteresting protagonist, stake that were neither personal enough nor important enough to create engagement, and it failed to add any significance to the MCU project. Where a common critique leveled at the MCU movies is that their villains are not interesting enough, on average, with The Incredible Hulk, I found Blonsky, a man dealing with aging frame and willing to go to extremes to save his physical abilities, a much more compelling character than Bruce Banner.

Iron Man 3: I am an outlier in that I prefer Iron Man 2 toIron Man 3. (And I do hope that they eventually ditch the number scheme.) IM3in many respects to a fairly bog standard superhero story, including a third act that revolves around the villain snatching the love interest and force the hero to save her. While the climatic fight is a wonder of action directing, the story feels flat and fairly lifeless. Plot holes make repeated viewings less enjoyable that other movies in the MCU but what saves the movie are terrific performances from the stellar cast.

Avengers: Age of Ultron: This film is hampered by following to closely the formula set forth in Marvel’s The Avengers. The third act once again sees the Avengers battling in hand to hand against forgettable, punch-able mooks, while stopping the main bad guy from his world ending plot. In addition to that bit of repetition, Age of Ultronalso repeats the beat of the villains getting inside the team to disrupt it, as well as a dim move on the villains part in capturing the ‘girl’ of the team, giving away his location. Really Ultron kidnapping Black Widow was a very clichéd move and pulls this entry down from Mid-Grad to Bargain Basement.

Tomorrow – Mid-Grade