Released: May 1st,
2015
Rated: PG-13
Distributor: Walt Disney Studios
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark
Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Aaron Taylor-Johnson,
Elizabeth Olsen, James Spader
Directed by: Joss Whedon
Written by: Joss Whedon
Personal Bias Alert: Joss Whedon fan, bored of comic book movies
6.5 of 10
The
summer movie season is here, and Marvel is kicking it off yet again with Avengers:
Age of Ultron. The team of
Iron Man (billionaire playboy crime fighter), Hulk (green rage monster), Thor
(golden god), Captain America (enhanced good ol’ boy), Black Widow (former Russian
spy), and Hawkeye (bow and arrow dude) have reassembled to finish what they
started in The Avengers: to get every remnant of Loki off their
planet. Despite, or because of, their
super powers/skills, they are incredibly bad at this task, with Iron Man instead
creating a homicidal machine named Ultron.
Ultron’s got daddy issues, so the Avengers are the first on his hit
list, followed by the rest of humanity. So
there’s your threat that only a super-special team can defeat, and the movie proceeds
from here like pretty much every other movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
As
someone who’s not a fan of Marvel’s popcorn movies, the grinding gears of yet another
bad guys vs. good guys plotline that does little delving into character or
themes is getting annoying, but at least here you have Joss Whedon. That means you get some good one-liners
thrown in, but the Marvel franchise has replaced character traits with
character connections, and the amount of i’s and t’s Whedon must dot and cross
to keep the universe going leaves almost no time for anything outside the
plot. Marvel has drawn a line in the sand,
and with the success they’re experiencing, they aren’t about to cross it to
convert the stragglers like me. It seems
that most people enjoy what they’re cooking, and if you liked The Avengers and all the other movies,
you’ll like Age of Ultron as well.
The
main cast of Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo,
Scarlett Johansson, and Jeremy Renner all return and play their parts with the
ease of those who’ve been there and done that.
Joining the cast are Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen as twins
with powers of their own and James Spader in the voice/motion capture
performance of Ultron. Taylor-Johnson
and Olsen get a couple decent scenes, but mostly they’re navigating action
sequences à la last year’s Godzilla. Spader brings his trademark borderline-lazy
nonchalance, which is to be expected but doesn’t quite work in the major villain
role. This failure mostly falls on Whedon,
who wrote Ultron with Spader in mind and ultimately never got the character
quite right. Ultron’s presumptive and
petulant, characteristics that don’t lend themselves well to a very menacing Big
Bad, and there’s many illusions to him being an evil Pinocchio despite the fact
that Frankenstein’s monster is a much more fitting comparison.
Age of Ultron is hampered by many other problems, some
of which stem from the film’s own premise.
The big difficulty with this group is that they aren’t really unified. They come and go as their own priorities pop
up, and their fighting abilities are all over the map. The times when they’re actually all together
are rare, and when they split up there always seems to be some character that
is simply forgotten about. Hulk is
continuously left behind in action sequences, Thor disappears for a large
portion of the down-time, and Iron Man is always flying away from everyone
else. They are a team in only the
loosest sense of the word, and the effort it takes to bring them all together
makes for some glaring contrivances.
An
even bigger issue is the nagging sense that the film feels tired, which comes
from the audience as much as from the filmmakers. Whedon has been vocal about how difficult Age of Ultron was to make, and many of
the cast members have expressed interest in leaving the franchise. Then you have the unfortunate fact that
filmgoers have seen so many similar things in the past year. Obviously, Taylor-Johnson/Whedon’s
Quicksilver fails to live up to the frenzy that the character’s appearance in X-Men:
Days of Future Past created, but there’s also the success of Guardians of the Galaxy, which thrived
on its sense of humor and makes the banter in Age of Ultron seem lacking.
Smaller things, like the humorous coincidence that the original
brain-version of Ultron looks exactly like the robot brains in Ex Machina, doesn’t help the timing
issues. However, the main problem seems
to be the lack of passion from Whedon and company, and it translates onto the
final product.
Despite
these downfalls, those making Age of Ultron
are talented enough to make a decent film even on autopilot. With the expectations and the odds stacked
against it, the fact that the film is even decent is a bit of a triumph. But if the world’s going to invest a quarter
of a billion dollars into anything, shouldn’t it be more than decent?
Other Notes (Ridiculous Superhero Version):
Ø How
is the ability to get in people’s head and shoot red things from your hands
connected?
Ø Why
did they have that squishy CGI look in the opening sequence?
Ø Why
did they make Cap adamant that civilians weren’t getting hurt in the middle of a
massive battle where civilians were obviously getting hurt?
Other
Notes (Regular Version):
Ø Those
twins were awkwardly close.
Ø The
crowd shots really highlighted how utterly white the Avengers are.
Ø Can
we discuss the fact that the woman named Scarlett didn’t play the Scarlet
Witch?
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