Some months ago, I decided to add The Avengers to my Netflix queue, I believe solely on the fact that it was directed by Joss Whedon.

That was a serious mistake. After ordering 3 copies of the movie, I determined that the DVDs were not scratched, they were merely encumbered with some sort of copy protection that prevented me from copying them to my hard drive.

This was enough for me. Any movie copy-protected is not a movie worth watching. Jonah disagreed, and insisted that we load it into our inherited blu-ray player and watch it before I sent it back to Netflix. So, I stuck it in the player, hit play, and went to the bathroom.

I also poured myself a scotch. Then lost the scotch. Then found it.

At this point, the DVD had been playing for about 8 minutes. I have no idea what it was playing, but it was not the movie. Instead, it appeared to be promotional material for the movie. But that was okay, because Natalie Portman was in the promotional material.

I eventually coerced the DVD to play in a time-frame that was longer than the insane amount of time it takes to see whatever you payed for at the cinema, and remarked that I couldn’t believe people payed for this experience.

As it started, I asked Joanna if it was an animated film. “Not really,” she said, “but there’s a lot of CGI.”

Yeah. It’s all CGI. I don’t know why they hired actors.

It started off promising with a shot of Robin in a skin-tight uniform with a sidearm. She spent a lot of time nearly, but not quite, grabbing that sidearm.

I waited anxiously for Natalie to appear. She did not, but I eventually noticed that the redhead with an extraordinarily poor command of the Russian language was Scarlet Johanson. So, Robin, Scarlet and Natalie. That’d make up for most things, right?

No. This was easily the most terrible movie I’ve ever seen. I kept thinking I would get up and go to bed, but I didn’t for two reasons. The first was that it was also the loudest movie I’d seen, and there was no way I was going to sleep through the remainder of it, and I know Jonah won’t give up on a movie. The second is that at the exact moment I’d decided to leave, either Scarlet or Robin appeared with their uniforms slightly more unzipped. The progress was agonizingly tantalizing. I knew it wouldn’t go anywhere, but boy did those uniforms make it hard to walk away.

And, if you’re one of the three people left in the universe wondering whether you should see this move, that’s what you should do. Walk away.