There’s many ways to spend two hours, doing charity work, fighting a cougar, or accepting that “ I’m home alone” text. Only two of those will make you scream like a schoolgirl in the way “Avengers: Age of Ultron” did.
“Age of Ultron” has the team facing a new robotic villain created by Tony Stark(Robert Downey Jr) that sets to destroy The Avengers and the world. The team will have to face internal struggles on top of possibly the biggest threat they’ve faced to date.
Character interactions stood out as the strong point as watching these characters banter is the heart and soul of this movie. The engaging dialogue makes it hard to notice any long period of no action not on screen because the audience is hanging on to every word.
Writer/Director, Joss Whedon, continues to show this movie is not built off of huge action pieces, but also a script. The running jokes were strong throughout, making for bigger laughs each time showing that.
This movie plays with more complicated themes, which excel the more straightforward original in the aspect with concepts like, good and evil, playing God, are Thor’s abs real, the important stuff.
The two most expendable Avengers got the most character development this time around, with Black Widow(Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye(Jeremy Renner) got to showcase why they deserve to be in this film.
Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Quicksilver didn’t live up to the bar set by Evan Peters standout performance last year in X-Men. His acting, was perfectly fine, it was more like Quicksilver was just there and didn’t do much.
Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch was the best new character and the one to look out for going forward. Her powers and vengeful personality add a new dynamic that brings life to her scenes.
The opening scene started out strong with perhaps the best set piece in the film showing the Avengers do what they do best, cause mass amounts of damage no insurance will cover.
The action was very well choreographed and directed, but there weren’t really as many stand out moments like in the last film, the triple threat in the forest or Hulk smashing Loki.
The movie doesn’t recapture that magic the first did with seeing all these larger than life characters together on screen for the first time ever. It takes a few steps forward and you know the rest of this sentence.
Parts such as the South Korea sequence were forgettable and would have been best left on the cutting room floor. Thor has a subplot that doesn’t really go anywhere; luckily things go so quick these are minor gripes.
It’s easy to see that the cast are so used to these characters after playing them so long. Little ad-libs like Tony Stark doing a little bit of dancing and humming as he invades an enemy fortress are loved and welcomed.
Ultron(James Spader) is a cunning villain, who was also sympathetic because he believed everything did was actually good, instead of the cliché “I’m evil”, while twirling his robotic mustache(rostache?). Yet, never feeling unbeatable, it was more like a question of when the team would defeat him rather than if they would.
Setting up the seeds for Civil War in this film gave great glimpses of what’s to come in next year’s movie when the heroes battle each other. There are many tense sense involving Cap and Tony that give audiences of mouth covering moments.
The 3-D felt like it was an afterthought and the only reason someone wouldn’t forget it was because ever so often the movie would throw a pebble or shoe, except in 3-D! This is disappointing considering how the previous Marvel movie “Guardians of the Galaxy”, made such good use of it.
The film is great and stands solid by itself, but when comparing it to the previous Avenger’s film or even the more recent Marvel film’s like Guardians or Winter Solider, it doesn’t stand as tall. “Age of Ultron” is a great summer flick with depth and some content that fumbles in parts.
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