10 Movies That Pissed You Off Straight Away

There's little denying that Joss Whedon's The Avengers is one of the most important and downright brilliant superhero movies ever made, because without its success the Marvel Cinematic Universe wouldn't be what it is today.

And yet, for as thrilling and entertaining as the superhero epic gets, the opening 10-minute sequence in which Loki (Tom Hiddleston) steals the Tesseract and destroy a S.H.I.E.L.D. research facility is kind of... terrible?

Whedon has never been a particularly fussy director from a visual standpoint, but this opening scene feels like he pawned it off to an assistant director to shoot while he dealt with something else.

The shot selections make it feel like a TV movie - an episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., even - and it doesn't help that there's some painfully hokey dialogue to boot, especially Erik Selvig's (Stellan Skarsgård) expository proclamation, "Loki, brother of Thor!," for the sake of anyone who hadn't seen Thor.

The whole prolonged sequence is so slack, both in terms of tension and humour, that the fear certainly sets in that Whedon's screwed up the most crucial MCU movie up to this point.

Thankfully, though, it finds its footing almost immediately afterwards as the scene shifts to Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and the rest of the movie is pure gravy.