Three years after saving New York from an alien apocalypse, Marvel’s superhero all-stars jump-start the summer movie season in Avengers: Age of Ultron, facing off against an enemy, possibly more dangerous than any alien life form.
This time around, the former S.H.I.E.L.D. agents go against Ultron — an artificial intelligence created by Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), from some data recovered at a Hydra base in the made-up Eastern European country of Sokovia. Just like in the comic book, Ultron believes that the human race’s biggest problem is the human race itself, and plans to wipe us right the hell out, and it’s up to our favourite box-office smashing badasses to stop him.
All of the actors did an amazing job in Avengers: Age of Ultron. The one thing that was particularly done well is that you got a real sense of the main characters being an actual family, which was great to see. The most notable performances, however, came from Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen. They actually nailed the Eastern European accents that the Maximoffs are supposed to have. Taylor-Johnson did an amazing job as Quicksilver, but, we happen to like Evan Peters’ Quicksilver from last year’s X-Men: Days of Future Past a lot more. And we’re not exactly sure what the hell happened to Elizabeth Olsen. It’s like out of nowhere she just became ridiculously hot. Unless we just totally did not notice, in which case … we’re idiots. Needless to say, she is totally on our radar now. Scarlett Johansson, we still loves you girl, but damn.
Other notable mentions are Paul Bettany as Vision, who really did a phenomenal job with his limited screen time, and James Spader as the voice of Ultron. He breathed life into the CGI baddie in a way that made him a really believable character.
It seems like returning writer-director Joss Whedon simply has too many balls to keep in the air for one movie. One of the biggest problems that we had with Avengers: Age of Ultron is that there are at least three or four stories going on at the same time, and there are more than a dozen main characters all vying for screen time when half that number would’ve been pushing it. So there wasn’t really enough time for any of us to develop any sort of emotional attachment to any one character. So when tragedy strikes (and it does), you end up having more reactions like ‘damn, that sucks’ instead of reactions like ‘WHY DID THIS HAVE TO HAPPEN? WHY GOD?!’ After it was all over, we felt like the survivors of an ocular holocaust.
Hawkeye has a much larger part this time around, because someone, somewhere, apparently gave a damn. Now don’t get us wrong, Hawkeye isn’t a bad character at all. But it’s not like anyone really cared anything about him in the first place. You can tell some of the story elements are setting up later Avengers adventures, like Black Panther and Thor: Ragnarok. There were a few moments that could have been cut out or cut short — like Hawkeye having a larger part. Just sayin’.
Overall, Avengers: Age of Ultron is a great movie, but we think that last year’s Guardians of the Galaxy was a better film, only because Avengers: Age of Ultron seems like it was trying way too hard to top The Avengers. With this said, while we feel that the crew deserves your hard-earned money, you can easily wait for the DVD release and not feel too bad about it.
