If you’re new around here, this is how the script goes: I damn “The Avengers” with faint praise, observing that the (supposed) culmination of the long, laborious Marvel Comics movie franchise is a competent but pointless popcorn entertainment that’s being wildly overpraised simply for existing without being incoherent and terrible. Some readers sniff from behind their digital copies of the Atlantic: Why did you even bother? Others lament that, once again, a non-fan of comic-book movies was sent to review something whose true significance, as with a sacred scroll written in Tocharian B, is yielded only to a coterie of gnostics and believers. (An enormous coterie, in this case.) Someone will invoke the ghost of Pauline Kael to instruct us that movies are meant to entertain, and someone else will suggest that the editors send me back to covering films about lesbian sheepherders made in Azerbaijan.

Well, there just isn’t enough output from Azeri lesbian cinema to keep me busy, so here we all are again. Cutting to the chase: “The Avengers” does what it needs to do, absolutely. In my conversation with writer and director Joss Whedon a couple of weeks ago, he promised Marvel fans that this movie would “deliver unto them,” and that it does, with two and a half hours of increasingly frenetic action and a swarm of characters who crack wise in Whedon fashion but feel strongly connected to the mish-mash Marvel mythology. If you’re not much of a Marvel Comics person but just want to get an early start on your mindless summer moviegoing, well, I guess this picture is no stupider than anything else. (As you can see, I possess a certain knack for writing irresistible blurb copy.)

If you belong to the significant quadrant of the population that feels a powerful, tidal impulse to belong to this pop-culture moment, and hence yearn to believe that “The Avengers” is terrific, explosive, awesome fun (or other language of your choosing), please don’t let me harsh your vibe. I mean that seriously; what kind of person would I be if I begrudged others a good time at the movies? But it’s my job — and, I guess, my inclination — to stand outside those tidal currents and view these big spectacles dispassionately, as far as I can. What I see in “The Avengers,” unfortunately, is a diminished film despite its huge scale, and kind of a bore. It’s a diminishment of Whedon’s talents, as he squeezes himself into an ill-fitting narrative straitjacket, and it’s a diminished form that has become formula, that depends entirely on minor technical innovations and leaves virtually no room for drama or tragedy or anything else that might make the story actually interesting. To praise the movie lavishly, as so many people have done and will continue to do, basically requires making endless allowances. It’s really good (for being a comic-book movie). It’s really good (for being almost exactly like dozens of other things). It’s really good (for being utterly inconsequential).

I saw “The Avengers” less than a week ago, and already much of it’s a blur; if it weren’t so easy to find plot synopses widely available, I’d probably forget key details. In another month, all that will stick with me is a few striking scenes and images: Tom Hiddleston, as the sneering Norse god Loki, compelling a crowd of Stuttgart civilians to kneel before him, until one older man, no doubt remembering the last time the Germans did that, rises to confront him. Or Robert Downey Jr., as playboy zillionaire Tony Stark cum Iron Man, delivering oh-snap comebacks one after another to Chris Evans’ ultra-square Captain America. (Have Downey and John Malkovich ever been in a movie together, doing their dueling “I’m so gay but I’m actually straight” routines? I think not.) Or Scarlett Johansson in a catsuit, as superspy Natasha Romanoff, cocking her head just so as if to acknowledge that she’s the idealized fetish object of the 11-year-old boy within every so-called adult male.

Is there any point in discussing the plot of “The Avengers,” anyway? If you’ve read this far, the odds are strong that you either A) already know the whole story, B) don’t want me to issue clueless spoilers or C) simply don’t care. For those who may choose “none of the above,” I can explain that one-eyed, super-secret government honcho Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has to reassemble the superhero team known as the Avengers after Loki — last seen in Kenneth Branagh’s “Thor,” getting evicted from Asgard, home of the Norse gods — comes to Earth in search of a mystical energy source called the Tesseract, with a force of insect-like space aliens following him. So Iron Man, Captain America, Natasha, Thor the Thunder God (Chris Hemsworth) and Dr. Bruce Banner aka the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo, in a nicely understated, embittered performance) all gather on a flying aircraft-carrier/command-center thingy, along with the imprisoned Loki, who plans to sow discord and dissension before his super-disappointing aliens — rejected by Michael Bay for insufficient gnarlitude, I think — show up to wreck the place.