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Avengers: Age Of Ultron begins with know-it-all philanthropist Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) putting into place a peacekeeping program. Why? Because he has far too much time on his hands, and with his ‘Iron Legion’, it basically deploys a number of silver iron men to the streets like the UK puts PCSOs on the beat. Naturally, the public don’t take kindly to the autonomous machines so it feels like a waste of time for him, until it leads to delivering a plot idea for Joss Whedon to spin 141 cinematic minutes around.
He’s tinkering in his lab with AI (artificial intelligence, but you knew that) and showing off to Dr Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), demonstrating that not only his equivalent of Knight Rider’s KITT (aka Jarvis) is cool, but that he’s developing the next generation of this, Ultron. Sounds like a great idea, but in the movies, the more power you try to give a computer in order to do its own thing, the more it bites the hand that feeds.
Naturally, once it gets too big for its own boots, Ultron (voiced amusingly by James Spader), decides world domination is the answer. And by incapacitating Jarvis, it means that Iron Man might actually have to push a button or three on a console, for a change, rather than simply talk to his machines like a robotic version of Doctor Dolittle.
Once out and about, Ultron’s plan is to gather up as much vibranium as possible for his own nefarious purposes, knowing how well it served Steve Rogers for his shield.
What leads on from there is more calamity which will put the world at its unease as superheroes crash and bash around the city, racking up not only an extortionate repair bill that even Stark would baulk at, but also cause a situation which would no doubt put him in jail for wanton destruction. After all, if two men have a fight in the street in Manchester, the worst might be a split lip and an f-word. If two superheroes do the same in New York, it usually results at the very least in a skyscraper requiring a whole new set of windows along all of one side of the building as they glance past, in some supercharged willy-waving contest.
(I’m here all week, tip your waitress)
I don’t know all the ins and outs of the Marvel canon, like all the big fans who follow every last comic book and graphic novel, so I’m just relying on what’s put out in the cinema, but compared to the engaging first film, Avengers: Age Of Ultron felt like rather a lazy sequel. There was a hotch potch of ideas which we’ve seen before in various movies; there was less humour; some of the action scenes felt like Whedon just thought “Hey, let’s just blow stuff up for no real reason!“; and there were more scenes taken up with romance and talking, reminding me of some of the worst times I’ve sat in the cinema, namely for Star Wars Episode II: Attack Of The Clones and Star Trek: Insurrection. There was also plain old kitchen sink drama, which might’ve filled in a bit of backstory, but when you sit down expecting a good solid two hours or so of action and entertainment, it didn’t cut the mustard. If I wanted that, I would’ve stayed home and watched Coronation Street or Eastenders.
If you thought Loki was a hard man to pin down, then Ultron has his own get-out, and when that was revealed to us, it felt like about two seconds of thought had gone into that one. There was also the obligatory Stan Lee cameo, this time coming in at the 25-minute mark, and Andy Serkis pops up to give us the worst cod-South African accent we’ve seen committed to film since Joss Ackland’s Arjen Rudd in Lethal Weapon 2.
Loki’s sceptre is like that eczema which just won’t go away, and it felt like Joss Whedon got bored after being in the same place country for more than ten minutes, as the locations were jumping from country to country just to see how many air miles the cast and crew can clock up, apart from all those scenes which are filmed with a green screen, of course.
There’s also some new blood in this sequel, firstly the twins – as highlighted in Captain America: The Winter Soldier – Quicksilver (aka Pietro Maximoff, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson – making me wonder why Evan Peters wasn’t used when he appeared as the character in X-Men Days Of Future Past) and Scarlet Witch (aka Wanda Maximoff, played by Elizabeth Olsen), who is a dab hand at being a baddie by screwing with everyone’s mind and making them feel like they’re in an alternate Nexus-style worldl like Star Trek: Generations.
There’s also the achingly hot Claudia Kim as Tony’s associate, Dr Helen Cho (below, alongside Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill), and also sizeable roles for Paul Bettary and Don Cheadle, although after Anthony Mackie was introduced in the aforementioned Captain America sequel as Sam Wilson aka Falcon, and since he pops up here early on, it seemed odd that they sidelined him until the end of the film. Is he just being paid for the Steve Rogers movies, then? Then again, Mackie shouldn’t worry since Whedon falls to the lazy stereotype of “Hey, War Machine is a black character, so all black people must say ‘represent’ from time to time, right?” during the scene where each character tries to lift Thor’s hammer off the table, in what clearly reeks of ‘deleted scene extra thrown into the mix as filler’ as, while it gets a small payoff later, it’s completely redundant to the plot.
Oh, and there’s been a bit of hoo-hah in the news about some topless pictures of Cobie Smulders in Women’s Health Mag.com, but it’s a US magazine, which is no good to us in the UK as there are no topless shots online.
Go to page 2 for more thoughts on the film…
As for how you should watch this film, should you choose to do so in the cinema, the choices will shout out 2D, 3D and IMAX 3D, but bear in mind that X-Men Days Of Future Past and The Amazing Spider-Man was the last Marvel-related film to actually be *filmed* in 3D – and with IMAX scenes, so anyone paying extra for 3D or IMAX 3D is just wasting their money, quite frankly. Any time you watch a 3D version of a film which was shot in 2D, the 3D will be applied in post-production. It’s meant to be a cost-cutting method, but if you have to go back and check and apply the effect to each frame, isn’t it just easier to shoot it with 3D cameras to begin with? The studios are getting better with the conversion, but before last night, I tried to watch the first Captain America film in 3D and had to switch back to 2D before too long as the post-production in 2011 made everyone look like cardboard cut-outs. The Avengers was better, yet not perfect, while Winter Soldier was a great improvement.
I chose to watch Avengers: Age Of Ultron in 2D as I can get discounted Odeon tickets through my workplace and they’re 2D-only. Thanks to the Odeon having case of “computer says no“, I can’t simply take these tickets and pay the £2.00 3D upgrade to get 3D tickets, so, effectively, a 3D ticket costs me twice the amount of a 2D one (and an IMAX ticket would’ve been £15.00 approximately)
Barely anything in it made me think “That was a must in 3D”. Even the Quicksilver kitchen scene in X-Men: Days Of Future Past was far better than any of his slo-mo antics here, and it might only have been a help for some of the action scenes where Joss Whedon was throwing everything about, resulting in it all mashing into one another.
Rumour has it that 2016’s Captain America: Civil War will be partly filmed with IMAX cameras, so that may be worth watching in that format. Whether the director has as much love for the IMAX camera as, say, Christopher Nolan in Interstellar or Michael Bay in Transformers: Age Of Extinction, remains to be seen.
Oh, and do we get an end-credits scene in this film? Of course we do. It’s…. (yes, I’ll put it behind spoiler tags)
Avengers: Age Of Ultron is the sequel to a film which had been on my to-do list for some time – The Avengers, or in the UK, so as not to be confused with the adventures of John Steed and Emma Peel, it was clumsily renamed, Marvel’s Avengers Assemble. The cinema was to the rescue, however, as my local Odeon (and, indeed, everyone’s local Odeon) was showing a double bill last night for The Avengers (yes, I’m calling it that) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (that one can only be called that). So, I booked a ticket for that a week in advance, as it was a mere snip at £5.50 in 3D for both films*. Since the Captain America character never grabbed me on his own, I didn’t get round to seeing either of his character’s films released to date, so that imposed upon me the bother of having to sit through the rather tedious Captain America: The First Avenger, where it was quite clear to any red-blooded male that Steve Rogers should’ve copped off long-time with Natalie Dormer and not Hayley Atwell…. well, maybe Jenna Coleman too, but I was disappointed that this Doctor Who companion only showed up for merely one scene. Come on, you at least get two months off from filming in the Tardis, so let’s have more of her onscreen!
Well, I really enjoyed The Avengers (8/10). Less so for Captain America: The Winter Soldier (5/10), but it was still an improvement on the first one (3/10). Do we really have to sit through his (hopefully) final solo installment next year, Captain America: Civil War? I guess so. Let’s just hope there’s plenty more Scarlett Johansson in that one, as Natasha Romanoff (aka Black Widow). In fact, let’s just have a film for her instead!
Anyhoo, then the stage was set, for Avengers: Age of Ultron to start at 12.01am. But it didn’t start at 12.01am. Sure, the lights dimmed at that time, but the bloody cinema insisted on a whole 20 minutes of adverts and trailers before starting the film. Oh, come on, Odeon! For a special screening like this, especially so late at night, everyone just wants to watch the film and get home!
Going back to The Avengers. Oddly, while we saw the mid-credits scene, featuring Ultron, it didn’t include the post-credits scene. The girls sat next to me in the double-bill told me what I missed out on, though.
(*And about that price – there was a later hiccup after booking, when it turned out that the correct price should’ve been £5.00. A couple of tweets & DMs to Odeon’s Twitter, and a call to the Odeon’s customer service line resolved that in the form of a partial refund back to my card, but when the two girls sat next to me said how they booked their seats two weeks in advance, I didn’t want to look like a cheap-ass, so kept schtum about my tiny victory. In fact,
Avengers: Age Of Ultron is released in UK cinemas from today and click on the poster for the full-size image.
And, finally, I’ll make mention of Channel 4 News and one of their anchors, Krishnan Guru-Murthy. I normally enjoy this show and watch it on a daily basis as it makes for a good summary of the news that day. Occasionally, however, things go a little ka-ka, and while I was watching the first Avengers movie, they broadcast his interview with Robert Downey Jr.
You can see the interview below in full below, and then Krishnan starts trying to turn it into some deep and thoughtful political interview, asking Downey Jr about some of his ramblings after he came out of jail, to which the actor says if he tried to pick apart some things he said in his past that made sense to him at the time, he could be there for two hours and still be no further forward. Then Krishnan, clearly uncomfortable at his further line of questioning, goes in for some rambling of his own, referring back to the actor’s dark days of his past including about his time spent with drink and drugs, at which point Downey Jr gets the nod to call time on the interview, and subsequently walks out.
What you don’t see below, which was broadcast on TV, came just after when Krishnan looks at the cameraman for support, gets none, and then shrugs, folds his arms and says, “Oh well”. It’s certainly not the newsman’s finest hour… or even eight minutes.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 141 minutes
Studio: Studiocanal
Year: 2015
Format: 2.35:1 (Redcode RAW (5K))
Released: April 23rd 2015
Rating: 6/10
Director: Joss Whedon
Producer: Kevin Feige
Screenplay: Joss Whedon (based on the comic book by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby)
Music: Danny Elfman and Brian Tyler
Cast:
Tony Stark/Iron Man: Robert Downey Jr
Thor: Chris Hemsworth
Bruce Banner/Hulk: Mark Ruffalo
Steve Rogers/Captain America: Chris Evans
Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow: Scarlett Johansson
Clint Barton/Hawkeye: Jeremy Renner
Ultron (voice): James Spader
Nick Fury: Samuel L Jackson
James Rhodes/War Machine: Don Cheadle
Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver: Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch: Elizabeth Olsen
Jarvis/Vision: Paul Bettany
Maria Hill: Cobie Smulders
Sam Wilson/Falcon: Anthony Mackie
Peggy Carter: Hayley Atwell
Heimdall: Idris Elba
Erik Selvig: Stellan Skarsgård
Dr Helen Cho: Claudia Kim
Strucker: Thomas Kretschmann
Ulysses Klaue: Andy Serkis
Madame B: Julie Delpy
Himself: Stan Lee
Student: Georgie-May Tearle
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.
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