Despite being quite similar in a lot of ways, the climax of the first Avengers film didn't receive nearly as much criticism of the following year's Man Of Steel. The grim and gritty Superman reboot got a lot of flack for having a third act which involved a hero smashing up an entire city but not spending a lot of time helping innocent bystanders but, then, Avengers didn't do a whole lot of that either. Same as The Winter Solider didn't really show the fallout of America's intelligence agency being exposed as a Nazi conspiracy, Iron Man's only nodded at how the advent of superheroics has affected the common man, and Thor...Thor's Thor. They all take huge, epic, often cosmic worldviews. What's happening on the ground? Finally, Daredevil takes the shiny worldwide (or universe-wide) view of all the other Marvel properties up until now, and finally reduces it down to the common man. Hell's Kitchen is grubby, it's real, and the principal concerns are organised crime and regular folk struggling to get by, instead of all this Infinity Gem nonsense that nobody can really relate to.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
