TNMC

Okay, let’s convert an adult-oriented comic replete with pop culture references, sexual innuendo, and a cast of douchebags into an animated, PG-13 straight-to-video abortion with only one of the above three ingredients. Care to guess which one it is? If you were thinking of vinegar and water, you should probably start seeing a psychiatrist.

What the hell, though. If you’re reading one of my reviews, chances are you’ve got self-image problems already. And if that’s the case, you’d get right along with some of the characters in Ultimates. Only, you won’t really find those characters in this DVD. I’m not a big fan of the Ultimates comic to begin with. I enjoy the narcissistic personalities and the sharp dialogue, but I can’t stand the celebrity name dropping. When the Hulk was threatening to tear Freddie Prinze Jr. apart, it was funny. Not so much when Shannon Elizabeth made a brief orbital cameo. Ultimate Avengers lacks the trendy atmosphere, but it also loses the dark humor and laugh-out-loud moments that the comic provided.  If you take away the only enjoyable portions of the source material, you've got a group of super-powered jerks who really want to bone one another.  Then you take away the boning.  That's Ultimate Avengers.  Wait, you're saying.  What's this Ultimates and Avengers and Marvel and whatnot and poppycock?

A few years back, Marvel launched a line of comics meant to revitalize their flagship characters. Instead of rebooting the whole series, they just started a new line of comics aimed at new readers. Spider-man and the X-Men were the first to get the Ultimate treatment. Eventually, the Avengers (as they’re known the regular Marvel canon) got a little spit and polish as the Ultimates. The team isn’t exactly kid-friendly. Captain America fights dirty. Giant Man drops Prozac like it’s Pez. Iron Man never hops into his armor sober.  And Thor is presumed to be an escaped mental patient with a giant hammer and a healthy hatred for the United States’ foreign policy. It’s a very contemporary take on a superhero team. It’s not the best out there, but it’s got plenty of quality to it. The Ultimate Avengers DVD tries to compress a year's worth of this into a little over an hour.

If you try to convert twelve issues of a comic into seventy one minutes of animated film, you’re going to have to cut things. Understandable. Ultimate Avengers actually does this pretty well. It compresses the essential plot and introduces the characters very economically. However, "economic" is a word I associate with Ben Stein, not high quality animation. I can think of a few directions they could have gone without losing the PG-13 rating or diverging too heavily from the original story, and I’m a gibbering lunatic with a mild drinking problem. What do I know?

I know I didn’t like this, and I know it could have been better. The dialogue was terrible. Captain America’s first words are "Let’s take this dump." I shit you not. He said those exact words. It was as though the writers knew they had a turkey on their table and they just had to let me know in the first five minutes what to expect. The voice acting was acceptable at best and downright nails-on-chalkboard at worst. Don’t buy it, unless you can get it for less than ten dollars. Rent it if you really want to punish yourself. If you’re in the mood for masochism, though, I’d recommend an air hammer and a shorn scrotum. At least then you’d be playing with yourself. That’s bound to be more productive than watching this crap.