Avengers: Age of Ultron Review

Earth’s Mightiest Heroes strike back for their sophomore outing but will they knock the ball out of the court or hit a second entry slump?

“Furious 7” may have whetted the audience appetite for what was to come but the first week of May has hit and with it, tradition is now in full swing; Summer Movie season has kicked off and Marvel is sitting at the heart of the launch.

“Age of Ultron” sees the now iconic heroes of the Marvel Universe (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye) reassemble to take down one of their most iconic comic book foes, Ultron, voiced by James Spader.

Created by Tony Stark as a means of preemptive peacekeeping, Ultron is an Artificial Intelligence gone rogue, seeing humanity as the ultimate threat to themselves and sets about wiping them out, enlisting the help of Hydra experiments Quicksilver (Aaron Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen).

Without being bogged down with origin story baggage and burdened with selling a genre wide revolutionary concept, “Age of Ultron” is able to hit the ground running hard and fast while upping the ante from their previous outing.

The team dynamic that only just started to come into play in the last third of the original film is on full display across this movie’s nearly 2½ hour running time and brings about richer characterizations, more fun character play, surprisingly subtle and touching relationship drama amongst its titular team members, and context to the wonderfully inventive action and fights that actually carry a significant amount of emotional resonance; pretty much everything that separates the cream of the crop from the lesser entries of the superhero genre.

Most of my fears regarding the overstuffing of the film have been significantly averted, with every team member having carved out a specific niche for themselves that contributes to the film in more ways than one and Spader’s interpretation of Ultron provides the Marvel Cinematic Universe with their best villain yet. All fears of him being a generic doomsday threat are completely dispelled ironically through having him humorously play into his own stereotype and taking it to an extreme punctuated by minor acts of subtlety and a comedic cadence that manages to humanize him more than nearly all of the actual human villains of the MCU.

And the movie gets bonus points for not only keeping a semblance of romanticism alive within a romantic genre but actually having its characters go out of their way to protect civilians from the collateral damage caused in the line of fire.

With all of the top notch character drama seamlessly woven into director Joss Whedon’s astonishingly intricate eye for action, “The Avengers: Age of Ultron” carries just about everything necessary to be the perfect summer blockbuster package and fulfills that role easily. It’s just a shame though, that it fails to be more than that.

Every frame of this film is oozing with ambition and about 75% of it nearly tops the best superhero movies ever made. Similarly to a great many projects of highly ambitious filmmaking, this also makes the spots that it falls flat all the more painful.

While I still hold DC’s efforts to get a cinematic universe off the ground so fast under scrutiny, I can only hope that the threat of legitimate competition can serve to light a fire under Marvel’s pants because these movies are starting to painfully succumb to structural formulas that served as great training wheels before the infrastructure could stand firm but are now preventing their full potential from being achieved.

Whedon has done a solid job headlining the Marvel Cinematic Universe throughout Phase 2 but it’s officially time for him to go. His trademark humor and snappy dialogue that served to endear the first film to a skeptical public is beginning to badly undercut the power of the drama, the severity of the threats, and the atmosphere of the tension.

“Age of Ultron” goes to some pretty dark places and asks some pretty tough questions. It’s hard to take many of them seriously however, when every single scene is intercut with and ended on a joke or gag that’s only chuckle worthy and feels downright out of place. They don’t quite sink the film but they do regularly downgrade it from being a powerful cinematic experience into a live action cartoon. Not a bad cartoon, mind you, but a lesser experience than what it could be nevertheless.

This misplaced humor goes hand in hand with another of the MCU’s unfortunate flaws; the third act “video game” climax.

The last 25 minutes of Age of Ultron features a tense and spectacular action set piece with dire ramifications and stupendous fight choreography that sadly has most of its edge and bite filed away and dulled by a series of story cop outs and gags that frustratingly leaves you colder to the payoff than you’d like to be while simultaneously making me aware of just how long I had been in that theater.

One scene near the end in which a certain character has a heart to heart conversation with Ultron on the beautiful chaos of the human condition perfectly encapsulates everything the film could have been and wanted to be. It also reminds you of how abrupt this character’s introduction was and how reliant it was on a sudden motivational shift in the characters of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, whom despite receiving top billing for the film, are ultimately wastes of space that don’t do the talents of their actors much justice.

I know it probably sounds like I’m coming down on this film pretty harshly, so let me just nail one little fact home; I love “The Avengers: Age of Ultron.”

For everything that it does wrong, it hits a home run on at least 2 others. It’s a distillation of everything that the MCU represents; it’s bold, innovative, intelligent, awesome and its unafraid to shake up audience expectations by doing the opposite of what is expected of Hollywood franchise filmmaking.

It just happens to also be a convergence point of the franchises weaknesses in addition to its strengths, which includes a struggle to contain mood whiplash, difficulty stitching their ending onto the story in such a way that doesn’t make it feel like an intricate but hollow afterthought, and focusing too much of their attention on stories to come rather than the ones that they’re in the middle of currently, culminating in a mid-credit sequence so insultingly misplaced that it actually outbids the stinger for “Green Lantern” in its lameness and has me questioning whether or not I’ll be sitting through the credits for these things anymore in future outings.

It’s a strong entry in its own cannon of films but coming off of the heels of films such as “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” which accomplishes a lot of what this film was striving towards in a more consistently impressive capacity and even its series’ own “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which made no effort to soften the casualty of its own safe status quo, I left the theater satisfied but skeptical for the future as opposed to the hope that experiencing its predecessor instilled within me.

With Phase 3 around the corner and the track record so rock solid you can count the duds on 1 hand, I’m on this ride for the long haul. I just hope Marvel manages to avoid future pitfalls in order to make it a memorable one.

7 out of 10