33. Iron Man 2 (2010)
Iron Man 2 came along at a time when the MCU hadn’t really figured out what it was. Sure, it was still dropping hints but, at the time, it was still primarily focused on the task at hand. As a result, the film was little more than a direct sequel to its 2008 predecessor.
While that’s not necessarily a bad thing (we still love standalone sequels), this just very much felt like “another adventure with” and the fact of the matter is that the adventure wasn’t all that great.
Though it does have a strong story in that focused on the decline of Tony’s health after his arc reactor began to fail, the execution leaves something to be desired as if often prioritized the entertaining elements of the story over the story itself.
Thus, while it cleverly utilised Tony’s charming immaturity as a mechanism for the character to cope with everything happening to him, the script relied on it too heavily which resulted in endless immature acts (the explosive house party) which were anything but charming. This hindered the development and pacing of the story which, when you met the one-dimensional villain, didn’t really improve.
Far from a poor film, it’s a highly-entertaining romp which Robert Downey Jr once again pulls off to perfection – and it also deserves credit for introducing Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow – but it was an uncharacteristic weak point for the MCU.
32. The Incredible Hulk (2008)
You’d be forgiven for getting that The Incredible Hulk ever took place in the MCU as, since the planned sequel was scrapped, it seems that Marvel Studios have gone to as much effort as possible to essentially retcon the film out of the shared universe – recasting Hulk for The Avengers while breaking down his backstory so that viewers didn’t need to watch the 2008 film.
That being said, it’s not just the behind-the-scenes changes that differentiate the film from all the rest, because The Incredible Hulk doesn’t even feel like an MCU film. It has a significantly different tone and is a lot more unnerving than the vast majority of the saga’s offerings, with some of The Hulk-centric and/or Abomination-centric scenes being rather terrifying.
The special effects were impressive and story itself is rather strong. And it was admirable that, being a reboot only six years removed from the less-enjoyable Hulk, it didn’t bother retreading Bruce Banner’s origin story all over again.
Instead, it used those off-screen origins to catapult us straight into this story. On that note, the relationship between Bruce and Betty was one of the most endearing we have seen from the MCU as Edward Norton and Liv Tyler’s natural chemistry made it feel like the pair had history and, considering we didn’t actually see that history, that’s quite the feat to pull off.
31. Thor: The Dark World (2013)
The God of Thunder’s second offering gets a lot of unwarranted flack but it is admittedly hard to overlook the fact that it took its title far too seriously. With dark elves who wanted to use their dark weapons to plunge us all into a dark world, the film was, for lack of a better word, dark. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it was just too far removed from the whimsically hopeful tone that made its predecessor so enjoyable.
The film’s use of Jane Foster is also rather questionable. In Thor, she may have fallen head over heels for a complete stranger far too quickly, but she was still a strong, independent woman who was determined to get to the truth and, in doing so, lived up to her reputation as one of the world’s leading astrophysicists.
In The Dark World, however, she became the archetypal damsel in distress, waiting to be saved by Thor as the Aether infected her. As a result, she remained at the center of the story throughout the whole film without ever really being involved in it.
That said, it’s still an enjoyable spectacle that deserves more credit than it gets (the Asgard portion of the film is visually-stunning) and the dark picture is flooded with metaphorical color every time that Tom Hiddleston’s Loki is on-screen – it’s just a shame that his screen-time barely amounts to 15 minutes in length.