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‘AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED’ Avengers: Age Of Ultron Review
AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON
Director: Joss Whedon
Cast: Robert Downey Jr, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo
Warning: SPOILERS TO FOLLOW
Back in 2012, Avengers, or Avengers Assemble if you were on this side of the water, cleaned up at the box office, taking over $600m in the US alone. So a sequel was obviously on the cards. The first film was entertaining enough with Tom Hiddleston’s Loki bringing an alien invasion force to Earth. Director Joss Whedon just about kept all the plates spinning in the air and it was a diverting couple of hours. Flash forward to 2015 and we have Avengers: Age of Ultron. The team is mostly the same but the threat is now robotic sentience Ultron, created by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) who is determined to remake the world in his own image.
Ultron is voiced by the wonderful James Spader and the production team have done a great job bringing the villain to life. However, Avengers: Age of Ultron doesn’t quite work: the film introduces a number of new characters including Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his sister the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) plus we now have the Avengers’ former artificial butler Jarvis, who now has a physical body in the shape of The Vision. Jarvis has physical form thanks to Ultron’s plan which has gone awry.
It is almost impossible to create a film with this many characters and this much action without sacrificing the core of what makes a film like this entertaining, namely characterisation. With this many players on screen, there is no space for character development and so it just becomes a giant logistical exercise with a series of fight sequences interspersed with some unconvincing personal moments. Of all the team, only Chris Hemsworth’s Thor really comes off well, with the Aussie making the God of Thunder likeable and human. There is a poorly executed love story between Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) which doesn’t work, an attempt to inject the terminally bland Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) with some sort of personality by giving him a wife and family, which falls flat and a tiny cameo from Nick Fury (Samuel Jackson) which adds nothing to proceedings. Spader does lend Ultron a bit of gravitas but he really doesn’t have much to work with. Johansson has no screen presence at all here while Downey Jr just comes across as very smug as Tony Stark. The 3D lends nothing extra to the film and the two and a half hour running time makes it feel bloated and very dull in places.
There are a few nice moments: the scene where the rest of the team take it in turns to lift Thor’s hammer is fun. But they are few and far between and mostly it feels like a very corporate exercise indeed. For a film about an evil robot, there is no small irony that it all feels like such a mechanical enterprise. Avengers: Age Of Ultron is tedious, overlong and ultimately forgettable.
Review: Joel Meadows
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