Movie Info
Movie Name: Avengers: Age of Ultron
Studio: Marvel Studios
Genre(s): Comic Book/Action/Adventure/Sci-Fi/Fantasy
Release Date(s): April 13, 2014 (Premiere)/May 1, 2015 (US)
MPAA Rating: PG-13
I will crush you with sarcastic James Spader dialogue!
The Avengers are a force to be reckoned with. In the war torn country of Sokovia, HYDRA has spawned the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) using Loki’s scepter. When the Scarlet Witch alters Tony Stark’s mind, Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) begins on a dangerous quest to protect the planet with the help of Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). Banner and Stark unwittingly unleash Ultron (James Spader) into existence and Ultron hopes to destroy the evil plaguing the world…mainly humanity! Teamed with the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, Ultron is seeking to destroy the world and the Avengers only hope might be the strange gem that gave him life.
Hulk’s going to get him some of that!
Directed by Joss Whedon, Avengers: The Age of Ultron is the follow-up to The Avengers of 2012 and the penultimate Marvel Cinematic Universe’s “Second Phase” film. Following Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014, the movie was met by mixed to positive reviews and huge numbers at the box office.
I’d admit I’m a fanboy. I don’t need a guide to know who the people are in the movie and can identify the issues where most of these characters first appeared. That being said, I didn’t love The Avengers. It wasn’t a bad movie, but it had its faults making it average. Avengers: Age of Ultron is a true sequel to The Avengers and has many of the same problems.
Never was a big fan of Scarlet Witch’s ambiguous powers…
The bottom line is both Avengers films are way too long. If they had shaved half-an-hour to an hour off of both of them, they would have been much better because both movies have points where the plots plod along with predictable Whedon dialogue. The first movie was rather consistent and streamlined, but this movie feels quite disjointed with the characters just randomly setting off to various areas around the globe. Thor might just jut off to have an adventure and Iron Man might go hang out with a supercomputer while Bruce Banner sits around the tower…it just doesn’t flow.
The basic plot is a comic book plot which isn’t a big problem for me, but Ultron seems wrong. He’s goofy, makes dumb jokes, and doesn’t really parallel the character in the comic. It also feels like there is a villain missing from the story. With legal rights to Marvel Comics spread through a couple of studios, it feels like Ultron should have been paired with Magneto or Doctor Doom for his master plot. I felt the movie needed a stronger villain with the ever growing number of Avengers.
Torn on the Vision. One of my favorite characters but seems like a cross between the Doctor and his former robot companion Kamelion
The movie has a star studded cast and is primarily about relationships. A lot was made about the bro-mance between Stark and Banner in the first movie and it is toned down here. The movie instead heats up the romance between Natasha (Scarlett Johansson) and Bruce…it is a Beauty and the Beast type story, but I prefer the Natasha, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), and his surprise wife (Linda Cardellini) storyline (which was borrowed from the Ultimates storyline). The movie also has the introduction of the weird almost incestuous relationship between Quicksilver (who was much better in X-Men: Days of Future Past) and Scarlet Witch…while setting up a relationship between Wanda and the Vision (played by Paul Bettany) for a future movie.
What is going on in most of this fight? Well better than that freeway fight…
I also wasn’t a big fan of the editing for this movie. Until the movie went to slow motion, it was hard to follow the fights. Movies like John Wick or big budget movies like Pacific Rim pulled off similar fights with a much better understanding of what was occurring in the fight. The Avengers battle scenes were often a mess with physics defying moves that didn’t even look cool (at least make them look cool…but they were still better than Mission: Impossible 2’s motorcycle fight scene).
Avengers: Age of Ultron would be a success regardless if they just had Iron Man rolling a ball around a room for two hours and would be debated just as heatedly. Movies like Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and the original Iron Man show the potential of Marvel movies, and I always hope that The Avengers will live up to the standards set by them. Avengers: Age of Ultron is an average movie that could have been better. Avengers: Age of Ultron is followed by the Phase 2 wrap-up of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in Ant-Man in 2015) and the Avengers return in Avengers: Infinity War in 2018.
Related Links:
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
