Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015, Dir. Joss Whedon):
Seven years and eleven films later, Marvel has become a fact of life, a snowball gaining speed, a juggernaut that (to paraphrase from another film franchise) will absolutely not stop, ever, until you are entertained. You can mark the seasons by the studio’s latest tentpole film: An Avengers sequel? Must be summertime. With an enviable track record of box office returns and audience adulation, it’s not quite accurate to say that the stakes have gotten higher for Marvel — it’s pretty much assured that Avengers: Age of Ultron will be another billion-dollar smash, regardless of critical reception. Still, with an ever-expanding universe of characters, movies, and TV shows, there’s always the danger of sameness, repetition and stagnation. How many times can we witness superheroes saving the world before it all starts blurring together? (Some might say this has already happened.) The first Avengers movie might not be the best Marvel film, but it was the most pure fun, and under Joss Whedon’s affectionate direction, it took pleasure in watching the sparks fly between its oddball heroes even as it allowed them to do all that cool superhero-y stuff. Lacking the thrill of novelty this time around, Avengers: Age of Ultron has to stand on its own merits as an action adventure. It does so, but not without a bit of a struggle.
As with the first Avengers film, the plot at its heart is straightforward. Still haunted by visions of alien invasion thanks to the climax of the previous movie, neurotic Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), the man behind Iron Man, decides to do what he does best and tech his way out of the problem by creating a global defense system called Ultron (voiced sardonically by James Spader). Unfortunately, Ultron gains sentience in a matter of seconds and decides that the best route to “peace in our time” is a world without humans, populated with an evolved race of bio-mechanical creatures. Throw in the fact that Ultron is just as wise-ass and unbalanced as Stark, and you have a disaster in the making, or more precisely, a recipe for high-spirited hijinks, minus gritty realism. (Wipe out Ultron’s army? No problem, they’re just robots.)
On paper, that sounds like foundation for a clean narrative, but befitting a film based on comic books, Age of Ultron is cluttered with incidents and characters. The plot is busy without being particularly cohesive, as the action hopscotches from Eastern Europe to Africa to Korea and back. Familiar faces from previous Marvel movies step out for extended cameos, and we get a couple of new super-powered characters with the brother-sister team of Quicksilver (Aaron Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). And of course there’s the “larger story” to service, as we get the usual hints about future movies, including Avengers: Infinity War and Captain America: Civil War. With all that material to burn, we don’t get to dig too deep into most of the characters, which is particularly unfortunate given the implications of some of the decisions made during the movie, including Stark’s lone-wolf decision to create Ultron, which deserves more ambivalence and emotional fallout than the script provides. Luckily for us, Whedon keeps things moving smartly, puncturing the pretensions of the genre even as he follows all the formula beats. “I wanted to take this time to explain my evil plan,” Ultron sneers at one point, just before blasting away at Stark. In Whedon’s world, there’s always time for a quip even in the midst of life-threatening peril, and his humor runs the gamut from literary (“It’s been a long day, like O’Neill long,” grumbles Stark) to deadpan (the wife of Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) begins a domestic chat with the qualifier, “You know I fully support your avenging…”). Most of the banter isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but Whedon is a master of throwaway snark, and he never lingers long enough for the failed jokes to sink in. Taking advantage of our shorthand knowledge of these characters, he gives each of our heroes turns in the spotlight, and is generous enough with the one-liners so that everyone is in on the fun on some level, including straight-arrow Captain America (Chris Evans) and the royal Thor (Chris Hemsworth).
Guard: The Avengers are here!
Baddie: Can we hold them?
Guard (incredulous): They’re the AVENGERS!
The film’s best moments come when it eases off the throttle. A comedy bit involving Thor’s hammer is as funny as anything in any Marvel movie, and a late confrontation between Ultron and Stark’s new creation Vision (Paul Bettany) is a surprisingly grown-up debate that goes beyond save-the-world dynamics. (“Humans are doomed,” Ultron sneers. “Yes,” is Vision’s unexpected answer, “but a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”) It wouldn’t be a Whedon joint without a few intimations of doomed romance — he’s at his most comfortable when he’s making his heroes uncomfortable at the prospect of intimacy — and this time around he plays up the affection between hardened assassin Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johannson) and Bruce Banner, aka The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). It’s an odd pairing, the super-competent killer with submerged regrets and the meek scientist with the barely submerged beast, and while it’s jarring to see Johannson and Ruffalo get near-weepy about their star-crossed love, it’s the closest the film comes to something that has long-term repercussions.
In other ways, the film is very much business as usual, and there are plenty of “let’s go to work” wisecracks that comment knowingly on the fact that this is just another cog in the franchise machine. Plot mechanics have never been Marvel (or Whedon’s) strong suit: an awful lot of time is spent maneuvering pieces into place, sacrificing depth for speed. Thanks to Spader, Ultron is an amusing foil, a smart-aleck prone to temper tantrums, but he’s too tangential to establish himself as a top-tier baddie. The requisite action scenes are a mixed bag: the opening sequence, wherein the gang conduct a raid on a HYDRA stronghold, is heavy on rubbery CGI and short on memorably choreographed action, while a later throwdown between an out-of-control Hulk and Iron Man encased in special “Hulkbuster” armor is a rousing mash-up of wit and visceral combat. All in all, a grand time is had by all, and yet, when we arrive at the inevitable “war of the armies” climax, you might find yourself appreciating the spectacle, while simultaneously being nagged by a sense of deja vu. Unlike the movies based on DC comics, Marvel tends to draw back from the brink whenever their stories flirt with the notion of game-changing consequences, which no doubt is a primary reason why they’ve succeeded as populist entertainment; people still like their happy endings. But while weight has its consequences — for proof just watch Man of Steel, which crumpled under its pretensions — weightlessness has its pratfalls as well. Watching our heroes fight off yet another horde of faceless bad guys, swatting them away like insects, you might wonder: Doesn’t every Marvel movie end like this? As the numbers of superhero films climb into the dozens, and fatigue threatens to sink in, how much longer can we enjoy the same slam-bam before the formula wears thin? “You want to protect the world, but you don’t want it to change,” Ultron taunts at one point. That line could very well encapsulate the Marvel cinematic style, and it hangs in the air over the holding pattern that is Age of Ultron, lingering after all the zippy fun has evaporated.
