I just saw this, and I can confirm that it was AWESOME!
I have been a Joss Whedon fan for a very long time, and I am very glad that he now has a super-mega smash hit success on his resume. Finally the rest of the world recognizes what us geeks have known all along.
Would like to see it, grew up a big comic fan, but in no rush. Ya Hawkeye aka Archery Man lol doesn't seem to fit the motif of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes", nor does Ant-Man nor Wasp and some others, but Hawkeye is a longtime mainstay of the team.
The story made his presence make sense, in the same way that Nick Fury's and Black Widow's did. By presenting him as more or less an exceptional S.H.I.E.L.D. agent rather than as a "super hero", they explained his involvement without having to come up with a dorky explanation as to why a regular guy with a bow belongs alongside the god of thunder and a monster that can break a mountain with one punch.
He was more or less called "Barton" the whole film, as Black Widow was "Agent Romanova" for the most part; I think "Hawkeye" and "Black Widow" were mentioned a couple of times more or less as nicknames.
If you're gonna make an "all-star" team of Marvel heroes don't you have to put guys like Spider-Man and Wolverine in there? Though those don't really qualify as "earth's mightiest", but who cares. The Justice League, DC's equivalent, is made up of heroes like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern etc., a true all-star cast!
But it would be completely out of character for either Wolverine or Spiderman to work for a big government operation like S.H.I.E.L.D.
How was Hawkeye not amazing, exactly?
The concept of a guy in a costume who runs around with a bow fighting crime is pretty retarded, and I was pretty skeptical about how he would turn out. But I think this interpretation of him actually worked really well. Ditching the comic book costume was a key decision, obviously. And when combined with modern communications technology and powerful allies, having a guy with incredible observation skills suddenly becomes really useful. And the variety of warheads he could put on his arrows was pretty neat. It did bug me that the number of shafts in his quiver never seemed to decrease, even well into a half-hour long battle scene.
-k