Avengers: Age of Ultron review

              Joss Whedon returns with Disney/Marvel’s much-anticipated “Avengers: Age of Ultron”; a bigger, longer, louder sequel to 2012’s successful superhero team-up, “The Avengers.” In what was once seen as the impossible task to bring together five separate movie franchises and support each protagonist under one umbrella universe, this idea is quickly becoming the new normal. With “Terminator,” “Star Wars” and Warner Brothers’ DC Comics properties setting up multiple films and side stories, the term ‘cinematic universe’ has become the new Hollywood buzz-phrase. Rather than waiting every two years for a single sequel to rake in the dough, now studios can expand the universe of an intellectual property and have many characters and plot ideas producing multiple movies at once.

            Of course this has been happening in the world of comic books forever, but the cost to mass produce and sell a 20 page superhero magazine is nothing compared to fortune it takes to pull off something as massive as their cinematic counterparts. Strangely enough, though the risk is higher and the economic stakes are raised to create these movies, their stories sometimes reward less than those provided by pulp they were modeled after.

           Iron Man (Robert Downy Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawk Eye (Jeremy Renner) and The Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) return to save the world yet again, and this time the threat is of their own creation—an impossibly smart robot intelligence named Ultron, voiced by James Spader.  After breaking into a soviet compound looking for…something or other, Tony Stark/Iron Man finds a robot technology that would allow him to update his computer A.I. with the ability to make his Iron-Dones smart enough and powerful enough to allow the team to retire. Quickly it grows too smart and develops its own reasons to kill the heroes. Newcomers Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) join the evil robot to avenge their parents and their childhood home, destroyed years ago by Stark’s military weapons.

           The set-up is simple enough, yet somehow the movie fractures into many whirling plot points and set-pieces that never quite harmonize, creating an out-of-breath, jumble of action-spectacle. Whedon is a smart writer and his knack for dialogue and characterization is still intact, but his work as a storyteller seems stifled by Marvel’s bottom-line to set up even more potential properties within their ever-expanding multi-verse. Midway through the film, the threat of Ulron, who’s marvelously introduced with a genuine sense of menace, is diluted by competing plots regarding mystical prophecies about magic gems and otherworldly cosmic dangers. By the end, the movie’s climax is strained to decide which story element needs to pay off. Allegiances change, more new characters are introduced, romances are fulfilled and further franchises are hinted at, at which point Stark’s self-destructive hubris is the thing we’re thinking the least about.

          Joss Whedon’s work as a television show-runner (“Buffy: The Vampire Slayer”, “Firefly”) has earned him a lot of goodwill over the years, but with “Avengers: Age of Ultron” it seems like his talent for telling extended, episodic stories is forcibly compressed into a confused and frustrating mess of a narrative. Some of the action is well-staged and entertaining—the fight between “Iron Man” and “The Hulk” is pretty neat—but most of it, while expensively produced, is ineffectual and weightless.

        The dialogue is quick and funny and these actors are now so comfortable in there theme-park personalities that even the most mindless scenes float along well- enough, but they’re supported by a plot that’s so over-stuffed with things to do, placed to be, and sequels to sell that it tears itself apart before it can naturally develop. 

Grade: C-

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/May-2015