The Avengers - Age of Ultron (2015)

For some reason Avengers 2, or Age of Ultron just didn’t work for me. It should have. They had all the major cast members back and even the same director, but it lacked something.

Everyone seemed to labour under the misconception that bigger, louder and more expensive is better, and that’s not always the case. The actors were all good without anyone being outstanding. They worked together when they had to, but didn’t have the same feel of cohesion that they did when fighting to save New York in The Avengers.

Its easy to see where a lot of the money went. The destruction of an unnamed African city while the Hulk and Iron Man hammer away at one another wouldn’t have come cheap. The sad thing about the scene, while its visually stunning and very well done is that the whole thing is unnecessary, or at least it didn’t need to be as long and as destructive as it was. Then there are all the locations; The Avengers go everywhere in this one: Sokovia (an invented Eastern European country), Africa (an unnamed location somewhere on the coast), Seoul and some stuff in New York and an undisclosed location somewhere in the US, but those were probably just sets. The party in NY is probably one of the best bits and it showcases the Avengers just hanging out and being friends.

The party also managed to explain why neither Jane or Pepper appear, and while neither Thor or Tony actually admit that they’ve broken up with their respective partners, reading between the lines, it appears that they have. Jane’s not that much of a concern for Thor, but Pepper was what kept Tony from going totally over the top with his reckless narcissism. In fact it’s Tony’s inability to work as a member of a team, his need to prove that he is the smartest guy in the room and his obsession with being the one person who can protect the rest of the world that creates Ultron. The absence of Loki hurt as well.

So much of this one just felt overdone and they lost sight of many of the things that made The Avengers such a great film.

As I’ve said the majority of the cast returned, including the peripheral characters like Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Erik Selvig, Heimdall, Sam Wilson, Rhodey (not really an Avenger, more of a tool that does the US military’s heavy lifting while wearing one of Tony’s suits), Peggy and of course Stan Lee, who is a veteran at the party, who bites off a bit more than he can chew and is carried from the room, drunkenly muttering ‘Exelshior’.

New cast members included Linda Cardellini as Laura Barton (yes, Clint had an unknown family. Only Nick and Natasha knew about them. I think it was dropped in there so that they could continue to force Natasha and Bruce together and to give the MCU an out when Jeremy Renner decides he doesn’t want to be Hawkeye any more) and Paul Bettany as Vision (yes, he was Jarvis’ voice, but as Vision he appears in person).

Most of the rest were bad guys: Julie Delpy was Madame B (Natasha’s instructress at the Red Room), Andy Serkis played a villainous arms dealer, Claudia Kim was Helen Cho, a brilliant doctor forced to do Ultron’s bidding, Ultron’s voice was provided by James Spader. Both Wanda and Pietro Maximoff had appeared in a post credits sequence in The Winter Soldier and those roles were filled by Elizabeth Olsen and Aaron Taylor Johnson. They were The Scarlet Witch (kinetic and mind altering ability) and Quicksilver (super speed). I couldn’t help comparing Taylor Johnson’s performance with that of Evan Peters, who played the same character in the X-Men franchise and unfortunately the Avengers version came off second best.

I don’t think Joss Whedon’s heart was in this one. I don’t know, but it just didn’t seem to be there. Very few of the usual Joss moments appeared.

I was a little sad that this didn’t work. I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy it, I did, but it didn’t have the same sparkle that The Avengers did and it even compared badly against The Winter Soldier, although Scarlett Johansson yet again walked away with all the acting credits.

The post credit sequence with Captain America and Black Widow training the new Avengers in Falcon, War Machine, Scarlet Witch and Vision, which indicates that the MCU is thinking ahead to when the regular cast members either get too old or don't want to play the roles any more that they have heroes ready and willing to go. This fits in the comic book Avengers, which is an ever changing roster.