But I wanted to see just how Marvel would handle a direct-to-DVD animated feature. Plus it was cheap, $13.

It's not horrible, I'll say that. It certainly suffers from Too Much Setup, but you can't really fault it for that since it's the first damn movie. The animation is fine, better than standard TV fare but nowhere near a theatrical release.

The movie is based on the first X issues of The Ultimates, which was in turn based on the early issues of The Avengers. Even though I recognize the classic value to the name "Avengers," "Ultimates" really is a much better name for a heor team of this type. To my knowledge, they're not "avenging" much of anything... but they are pretty "ultimate," in the super-powered sense. Marvel must have figured the Avengers name had more brand power, since the DVD should more accurately be titled simply "The Ultimates: The Movie." Aside from the name change, the Ultimates don't stray very far from the regular Marvel U. Oh, except that Nick Fury is now played by Samuel Jackson.

Overall, there was some seriously strange choices made. For one, the movie is deeply confused about who is in the audience. The action is, for lack of a better term, more violent... yet it remains shockingly bloodless. There are some fairly adult concepts (Thor as a Greenpeace protester, hints of Iron Man's alcoholism, Captain America seeking peace with his lost past, some sexified costumes on the women), yet the Aliens Attack! story is ridiculously random. It's almost a sidebar issue to the team forming, instead of being the real reason as to why they form. So who is the movie for? Simple story and tamed fistfights for kids, or hardcore action and deep characterization for adults? It wants to be both, and thusly fails on either score.

The Hulk plays a big role, both as duplicitous scientist and as runaway monster. There's so much Hulk that he steals the show; at times it feels like an animated sequel to the CG Hulk movie. Bruce Banner is really the only character in the whole movie with a plot attached to him.

Maybe I fixated on Hulk's sequences because the other half of the movie, Captain America's story, was so trite. The opening WWII scene sets the stage in a grandly stupid fashion - Captain America and his wartime brigade storming a Nazi castle to find aliens inside - and he doesn't fare much better after that. The movie does take the time to re-connect Cap with the people he left behind 60 years ago, but in a predictably boring way. And then there's the cliched scenes with Cap getting used to "modern" technology, like televisions at a department store.

The other members aren't left much characterization to fight over. You get the feeling Iron Man desparately wants some screentime to tell his story, but they ran over budget. He is lost amongst the cliches of the rest of the team: Thor the do-gooder, Giant Man the asshole, Wasp the female.

There are some fun action bits, but they mostly center on one character throwing another character into a wall. The aliens reveal themselves to be completely incompetent, mindless villains, and much of the more drastic violence is visited upon them. The movie didn't convince me that these characters were truly fighting against all odds. Thor doesn't even use the sharp edge of his axe, for crying out loud.

One thing that really drags the whole production down is a complete lack of style. The character designs look straight out of any given 1980s boys' action cartoon... which makes them all appear hopelessly out of date when compared to the streamlined, stylized, anime look of just about any boys' action cartoon of modern day. It's an animated throwback. I'm not saying they had to go all Teen Titans with it, but it's as if they didn't attempt anything new and fresh with it at all. It's boring. The only visual trick that differentiates Ultimate Avengers from, say, any given episode of G.I. Joe is a preponderance of air-brushed shadows.

I did enjoy the extras. First, you have a look at Ultimate Avengers 2... and I always like seeing storyboards and such for animated movies in development. Then there's a great documentary that sorta covers the history of the Avengers comic, with plenty of interviews with comics creators who obviously like these characters far more than I do. It's the best thing on the whole disc. And I learned the proper way to say George Perez's name. The emphasis is on the first syllable, duh.

There's also an embarrassing montage of lots of amateur jerks who "auditioned" to be voice talent for Ultimate Avengers. What a win-win: announce that you're looking for fans to do voice work, reap all the free press from an excited comics fanbase, and then say they all suck and put together a video piece to laugh at them. I have to get behind that.

So, pretty mediocre. But then again, $13.