When Tony Stark and Bruce Banner try to jump-start a dormant peacekeeping program called Ultron, things go horribly wrong and it's up to Earth's mightiest heroes to stop the villainous Ultron from enacting his terrible plan.
Variety
The most successful superhero movie of all time gets a super-sized sequel with surprising amounts of soul.
Three years after saving New York from an alien apocalypse, Marvel’s superhero all-stars once again find the weight of the world — or, at least, an airborne chunk of Eastern Europe — thrust upon their mighty shoulders in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” a super-sized spandex soap opera that’s heavy on catastrophic action but surprisingly light on its feet, and rich in the human-scale emotion that can cut even a raging Hulk down to size. Having gotten over the hump of assembling his six main characters in 2012’s “The Avengers,” returning writer-director Joss Whedon brings a looser, more inventive and stylish touch to this skillful follow-up, which finds our now S.H.I.E.L.D.-less defenders facing off against a man-made enemy more dangerous than any alien life form. Jump-starting the summer movie season on May 1, “Age” may well cool its heels in theaters until the dog days of August, where it stands a very good shot at surpassing the previous film’s $1.5 billion worldwide haul.
For all its box office muscle (making it the third-highest domestic and global grosser of all time, behind “Avatar” and “Titanic”), “The Avengers” was hardly the most glittering gem in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, arguably more memorable for its snappy banter between caped crusaders than for its two gargantuan, pummeling action setpieces (one on a state-of-the-art aircraft carrier, the other on the streets of Manhattan), which seemed haphazardly stitched together by Whedon and his editors, as if they were being paid by the cut. That movie largely lacked the more intimate, character-building moments that had distinguished the first “Iron Man” and “Captain America” adventures from the superhero herd. But it did have two aces up its vibranium sleeve in the form of Tom Hiddleston’s fratricidal Loki (sinking his teeth into each of Whedon’s faux-Shakespearean lines as though they were ripe, juicy plums) and Mark Ruffalo’s existentially conflicted Dr. Bruce Banner/Hulk, ill at ease in his own body whether green or white.
Having apparently resolved that one failed Earthly invasion is enough for one millennium, Loki is nowhere to be found in “Age of Ultron,” but even minus his caustic wit, the new movie is a sleeker, faster, funnier piece of work — the sort of sequel (like “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” “Superman II” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” before it) that shrugs off the self-seriousness of its predecessor and fully embraces its inner Saturday-morning serial. Rather than putting all his eggs in one apocalyptic basket, Whedon this time hopscotches the globe from Europe to Africa to Asia and back, staging exuberant mini-cliffhangers as he goes. And if we must once again watch the world end — or come perilously close — “Age of Ultron” at least gives us a more compelling (and plausible) destroyer than yet another galactic supervillain hellbent on domination. Specifically, it gives us that most destructive of all universal forces: man’s own best intentions.
Before all that, this second chapter plunks us down in the wintry republic of Sokovia, where Captain America (Chris Evans) and the gang raid a mountaintop Hydra base to retrieve Loki’s troublesome scepter from the clutches of Baron Wolfgang von Strucker (Thomas Kretschmann, last seen up to no good in the post-credits teaser from last year’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”). It’s there that the team first encounters two new, genetically enhanced foes: the twins Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), he of blinding speed and she of blazing psychic powers — including the ability to infect others with vivid and terrifying waking dreams rooted in their deepest fears. These nifty phantasmagorias allow Whedon to flex his visual imagination in ways that the first “Avengers” never hinted at (think “A Nightmare on Marvel Street”). But a greater threat to the Avengers hides in plain sight much close to home. Its name is Ultron, and it begins life as a kind of ghost in the Stark Industries machine: an artificially intelligent “global peacekeeping initiative” designed to serve as “a suit of armor around the world.” Iron Man, meet Iron Dome.
As such brainchildren are wont to do in the annals of science fiction (where man routinely suffers for playing God), Ultron enters sentience with some major daddy issues and the temperament of a hormonal adolescent, ready to bite (off) the hand that fed him and then some. When the character of Ultron first appeared in the “Avengers” comics circa 1968, he was the Frankenstein-like creation not of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) but of “Ant-Man’s” Hank Pym. But for the character’s movie debut, Whedon has made him over into a kind kind of power-mad Pinocchio (along with a few sly nods to the 1940 Disney animated classic) who needs no help from a fairy godmother to lance his strings, assemble a makeshift suit of Stark Industries armor, and raise an entire drone army in his own image. (Like father, like son, indeed.) The movie’s visual-effects wizards (a whopping 19 companies are credited) have a grand old time with Ultron’s herky-jerky movements, but James Spader has an even grander one giving voice to the machine-man’s self-aggrandizing sentiments — a diabolical purr that sounds like HAL 9000 reborn as a Vegas lounge lizard.
Of course, what Ultron wants most of all is to become a real live boy — well, that and to turn a sizable chunk of Sokovia into a meteorite to be hurled back at the Earth like a fast ball down the middle. But even as billions of lives hang in the balance, “Age of Ultron” takes (welcome) time out to show us what our Avengers do when they aren’t busy avenging. In the case of Banner and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), that makes for a nicely hesitant romance between savage man-beast and the woman (with no shortage of her own emotional baggage) who knows how to soothe him. Ruffalo and Johansson have terrific chemistry together, and they become the tender core of a movie that also makes a surprising reveal about the personal life of Jeremy Renner’s Clint Barton/Hawkeye, and frequently reminds us that, while sticks and (infinity) stones may scarcely harm these Marvel mainstays, their psyches have suffered their fair share of heavy blows. (Taking his cue from those reviews that compared the first “Avengers” to a comicbook “Rio Bravo,” Whedon has also amped up the Hawksian vibe here, including some amusing macho posturing having to do with Thor’s mighty hammer.)
When the movie does return to symphony-of-destruction mode, it stays engaging precisely because Whedon has given us reasons to care — at least a tiny bit — about the all the whirring and smashing and booming and crashing. It helps that the actors by now wear these roles as comfortably as second skins — an enviable model that those forthcoming superhero alliances, “Fantastic Four” and “Justice League,” can only hope to follow. (Even Downey, whose smirking sarcasm had already begun to wear thin by the time of “Iron Man 3,” is kept relatively in check here, despite his top billing.) And while Whedon still lacks the innately gifted image-making of his obvious role model, Steven Spielberg (or of his fanboy contemporary, J.J. Abrams), he keeps the movie’s heavy machinery in constant, fluid motion. If this is what the apotheosis of branded, big-studio entertainment has come to look like in 2015, we could be doing much worse. Unlike its title character, “Age of Ultron” most definitely has soul.
Working for the first time with British d.p. Ben Davis (“Guardians of the Galaxy”), Whedon thinks the film out in more cinematic terms than the prior installment, with some complex tracking shots that last for upwards of a whole minute. Dueling composers Brian Tyler and Danny Elfman have provided a surfeit of speaker-rattling action music, though the most memorable passages remain those recycled bits of Alan Silvestri’s brassy “Avengers” fanfare.
Rolling Stone
Captain America actually says “shit.” You heard me. “Language,” scolds Iron Man, who can’t hide his glee at seeing the Cap, a flag-wearing Greatest Generation war hero, dent his tightass image. You won’t have more fun anywhere than losing your shit at Avengers: Age of Ultron. And you don’t have to be a Marvel geek to get with the vibe. In this sequel to 2012’s The Avengers, which helped writer-director Joss Whedon achieve world box-office domination, the movie swings for the fences, going darker and deeper into the bruised psyches of this dysfunctional family of warriors.
Don’t get me wrong. Age of Ultron is a whole summer of fireworks packed into one movie. It doesn’t just go to 11, it starts there. But it’s best when Whedon sins against the Hollywood commandment of playing it safe. He takes a few wrong turns, creating a jumble when the action gets too thick. But he recovers like a pro, devising a spectacle that’s epic in every sense of the word.
What do you need to know? That Tony Stark/Iron Man (quipmaster Robert Downey Jr.) has fucked up, big-time. His peacekeeping program, Ultron, has become a robotic force of artificial intelligence (motion-captured and voiced with honey and malice by James Spader) intent on destroying every human on the planet. That can’t happen, so cue Team Avengers, including Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Captain America (Chris Evans) for hammer-and-shield showmanship; Hulk (a superb Mark Ruffalo) for tempering rage with sexual healing from Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson); and, best of all, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) for a startling backstory that Renner imbues with exhilarating humor and emotional heft.
For added spice, Whedon brings on the newbies. There’s the twins, Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). Someone points out that “he’s fast and she’s weird.” That ain’t the half of it. When Whedon and his FX team send the twins’ fictional Eastern European country into orbit, you’ll see why. Still, no one steals scenes from Ultron, except the Vision, an android played with touching gravity by Paul Bettany, who previously voiced Iron Man’s A.I. confidant J.A.R.V.I.S. and who reps the film’s moral conundrum.
Wait, what? Moral conundrum? What kind of escapism is this? IMO, it’s the best kind, the kind that sticks with you. Whedon is the true master of the Marvel Comic universe onscreen. He won’t be back when Avengers: Infinity War, Part 1 and Part 2 start shooting next year. The Russo brothers will take the helm. That makes Age of Ultron Whedon’s last Avengers hurrah. And the monumental battle between gods and monsters that he stages to end the film does him proud. Bravo.
Time Magazine
Like many if not most people, I have a favorite Avenger. Mine is the Vision. He’s not an A-list Avenger like Thor or Captain America, but he has a ridiculous number of superpowers: he’s superstrong, he can fly, he can walk through walls and shoot beams out of a gem on his forehead. Also, he’s married to the Scarlet Witch.
The Vision is never going to hold down his own solo movie—probably because he’s weird-looking and an android—but he does make an appearance in Avengers: Age of Ultron, the sequel to Marvel’s vast, Olympian, franchise-melding The Avengers, which made more money than any other film in history except Titanic and Avatar. You can see why: there’s something decadent and supersaturated about these movies, like you almost can’t believe the munificence of a Hollywood that would put Iron Man and the Hulk (and the Vision) in the same movie.
Like the first one, Avengers: Age of Ultron was written and directed by Joss Whedon, among whose many virtues is an indelible, infallible touch with character, which is important because in Ultron he has to introduce them at a furious rate. In addition to the six regular Avengers—and irregulars like Nick Fury, War Machine and the Falcon—we get not only the Vision but also the sorcerous Scarlet Witch and her twin brother Quicksilver, who has superspeed. Or as one character describes them, “He’s fast, she’s weird.”
Then there’s Ultron himself, a super-intelligent, borderline indestructible robot created with good intentions that have gone awry—he’s now trying to wipe out humanity. Physically Ultron looks like an animate, damascened suit of armor; having no nose, he also bears a family resemblance to Voldemort. As voiced by James Spader, Ultron displays a finely honed, mordant sense of humor. Responding to a noble, idealistic speech, he begins, “I can’t physically throw up in my mouth …”
If anything, Whedon’s writing is almost too sharp. The characters are so finely drawn and verbally quick (they name-check Banksy and Eugene O’Neill) that they seem to belong to a different universe than the cartoonish one they find themselves in. They’re smarter than it, but in order for the plot to get rolling, Tony Stark has to make the rookie mistake of trying to create a superpowered artificial intelligence using a gem embedded in the staff of Loki, god of evil. You can see Stark actively struggling to convince even himself that this is a good idea. Likewise, no one ever seems quite sure why the nonsuperpowered, merely handy Avengers, Black Widow and Hawkeye, are in the group at all, since they’re constantly in danger of being squashed like bugs.
With Ultron, Whedon has the opposite problem: he’s got too much power. Ultron represents a new trend, the cloud-based villain. While he has an impressive robotic hardware body, his essence is software, so he can spread anywhere on the Internet more or less instantly and copy himself at will. Pulverizing his body doesn’t do much good: he sheds bodies the way we shed old iPhones.
To give the Avengers even a fighting chance, Whedon has to keep Ultron in shackles, like a robotic Harrison Bergeron. He makes Ultron fond of small talk and sentimentally attached to the human form—we know what killer robots look like, and they don’t look like Ultron, they look like Predator drones. Ultron doesn’t back himself up conscientiously either. He’s not even fully wireless—-several times we see him tethered by what look like Ethernet cables. He pulls his punches: never mind trying to hack the world’s nuclear arsenal, why doesn’t he hack the Avengers’ jet? Surely there are a couple of zero-day flaws in the firmware. Or never mind that—he ought to hack Iron Man’s suit.
A real Ultron would be completely distributed and systemic, the way real-life supervillains are: climate change, Ebola, political inertia, economic inequality. You couldn’t smash them with Thor’s hammer—or you could, but it wouldn’t do any good. That would be truly scary. But not nearly as fun to watch.
Total Film/SFX
Meet FrankenStark’s monster…
The fan frenzy, smart marketing and merchandising around the Hulk-sized franchise that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe means sequel Avengers: Age Of Ultron would likely make a packet even if it solely consisted of the gang playing Marvel Super Heroes on Disney Infinity while eating Kellogg’s Avengers fruit-flavoured snacks straight from the packet and wearing Avengers jim-jams lit only by an Age Of Ultron lamp for two-and-a-half hours.
Fortunately, returning director Joss Whedon understands how to craft a superhero movie just as well as Marvel knows how to sell one.
We rejoin the team mid-action as they tussle with HYDRA agent Baron von Strucker’s (Thomas Kretschmann) men on a mission to retrieve Loki’s stolen sceptre. It’s an expert and epic sequence, a judicious use of slo-mo showcasing each Avenger’s special skills whilst offering a lean recap of the main characters for anyone who’s been under a rock since 2012’s Avengers Assemble became the third-highest-grossing film of all time.
It’s the first of several impressive action set-pieces yet Avengers: Age Of Ultron also establishes itself as primarily concerned with the personal and the political – a superhero movie grounded in the real world, focused on family, ethics and psychology.
So, following on from the extra-terrestrial threat of the Loki-led Chitauri and HYDRA’s infiltration of S.H.I.E.L.D., the world is a bleak place, with Cap (Chris Evans) et al fearing for the safety of the human race. There’s a fresh threat in the attractive but unnerving form of mysterious twins Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) Maximoff, generic experiments harbouring a disturbing secret which has given them particular beef with Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr).
Stark himself has grown paranoid, relying heavily on his ‘Iron Legion’ of mechanoid surrogates who look suspiciously like unofficial police-bots. He says he wants to “put a suit of armour around the world” but when that suit of armour becomes sentient, things get nasty…
AOU is about hubris, it’s Marvel’s take on the Frankenstein story with unplanned-for Ultron as Stark’s hideous progeny. He’s a whip-smart, quip-smart, hyper-intelligent infant who takes after but hates his ersatz father so wants to rebel in the most dramatic way possible.
James Spader, who provides Ultron’s voice, is perfect, oozing intelligence and sophistication tinged with rage and righteous indignation. A megalomaniac who’ll pause for a perfect one-liner to with which to wither Stark while destroying the rest of his race without a thought, he’s a genius sociopath who mirrors his creator, Whedon’s horror roots showing through magnificently as AOU becomes the first genuinely frightening entry in the franchise.
The price, though, is a serious tone which differentiates the film from the rapid-fire funny Avengers Assemble and warmly anarchic Guardians Of The Galaxy. There are gags but AOU is tonally much closer to The Winter Soldier, laying ground for Captain America: Civil War, which promises to be darker still. The Maximoffs – soon revealed to be Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch – stay away from colourful spandex but carry an emotional heft.
As opposed to X-Men: Days Of Future Past’s cheeky, sneakered videogamer mutant (as played by Evan Peters), Taylor-Johnson’s Quicksilver is serious and embittered while Olsen’s Scarlet Witch plays more like a J-horror girl ghost than a superhero. High-flying synthetic being The Vision (voice of Jarvis, Paul Bettany, in a whole new role), meanwhile, is something else altogether.
Six main Avengers, a handful of S.H.I.E.L.D mainstays and three flesh-and-blood newbies, not to mention a robot army, means it’s already a battle for screen time, yet AOU still manages to be cameo-tastic, bringing back a host of favourites from previous stand-alone movies as well as some significant fresh supporting characters (including Andy Serkis as an arms dealer who’s afraid of cuttlefish).
And, somehow, it works. There’s a love story, a tragedy, a shock reveal, eye-popping action, tear-jerking emotion and a crazy/creepy baddie who might possibly prove too much for younger viewers. And there’s as much interior turmoil as external, as Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) struggle with their pasts, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) wrangles his responsibilities and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) juggles his work/life balance.
If there are problems, they’re inherent to the genre. At 141 minutes it feels long, particularly in the final act which, as in almost every superhero movie, involves a massive (and impressive) extended battle sequence.
Beautifully choreographed, expertly directed and edited so that – despite the vast headcount – every punch, kick and smash is coherent and clear, it is nevertheless just a giant fight which, broadly speaking, can surely only end one way. (The mid-credits reveal is also slightly underwhelming but the tingle-inducing closing shots of the film will mean you barely notice.)
In short, Avengers: Age Of Ultron remains right at the top of its game. Forget the MCU, this is event cinema which puts Marvel right at the centre of our own, real-world cinematic universe.
The Wrap
Sequel fatigue for the second chapter of any cinematic saga is generally a given, but “Avengers: Age of Ultron” sags under the weight of not only its 10 Marvel Cinematic Universe predecessors, but also the dozen or so already-announced follow-ups.
In the first “Avengers,” writer-director Joss Whedon showed a facility for bringing modern comic books to the screen with equal parts snappy banter and awe-inspiring mayhem, and while those gifts remain evident in “Ultron,” you can feel the functionality of Disney’s Marvel movies overwhelming the fun. This latest film isn’t a cheat, but neither is it a delight.
“Ultron” begins with the action already in progress, with Iron Man/Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) storming the castle of Baron Strucker (Thomas Krestchmann), the last uncaptured agent of Hydra. Strucker possesses the Staff of Loki, which contains a jewel that drives the plot in various directions, particularly when Stark realizes that there’s an intelligence within the stone that could provide AI for an army of robotic Iron Men to keep Earth safe from outside invaders.
Stark is swiftly punished for his hubris when that artificial intelligence becomes Ultron (voiced by James Spader), who infiltrates the world’s computers and begins assembling his own mechanical army to erase humanity and allow the planet to start over without us. Aiding Ultron are two former lieutenants of Strucker’s, twins Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Pietro Maximoff (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose powers (as Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver) are succinctly summed up by SHIELD’s Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders): “He’s fast, and she’s weird.” (Hill is too tactful to point out that their powers do not include successfully grappling with an Eastern European moose-and-squirrel accent.)
Avengers254d115799263bThere are moments of respite between the big battles, and that’s when Whedon can give us his trademark badinage. What he does less successfully is fit in quotidian moments with Black Widow, Hulk and Hawkeye, the characters who haven’t had movies named after them over the last three years. Add some crammed-in cameos from the sidekicks from “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” “Thor: The Lost World” and “Iron Man 3,” and the film starts to resemble a phone booth crammed with frat pledges.
(Anyone not present and accounted for — Gwyneth Paltrow and Natalie Portman had other engagements, apparently — is at least mentioned in dialogue.)
All these minor characters and blueprints for their function in the coming chapters give “Ultron” a bloat that the prior film didn’t have, and while the movie jumps through enough hoops to remain entertaining on a basic level, it doesn’t have the giddy enjoyment factor of “Avengers” and “The Dark World” nor the smarts and character development of “The Winter Soldier.” Marvel movie die-hards will come away having found nuggets of pleasure, but those who complain about superhero sagas will find plenty to support their arguments here.
The ensemble cast (which also includes Don Cheadle, Stellan Skarsgård, Linda Cardellini and, of course, Samuel L. Jackson) knows exactly what they need to do and delivers it with a minimum of fuss; the scene-stealer of the bunch turns out to be Spader, who makes Ultron one of the screen’s drollest destroyers of worlds. Ultron is menacing but never unmotivated, and Spader knows just how to give Whedon’s dialogue the right lilt to make it both witty and terrifying.
It may well be that we’ll eventually stop looking at these Marvel films as discrete, individual experiences rather than chapters in an epic binge-watch, but even by those standards, “Avengers: Age of Ultron” feels like a solid but overstuffed episode, one more concerned with being connective tissue than anything else. Future Marvel-movie marathoners will find plenty of sandwich-grabbing opportunities during its running time.
Entertainment Weekly
These days, we’re so used to feeling short-changed when we go to the movies that it may seem churlish to complain when someone gives us too much. But with Marvel’s latest comic-book battle royale, Avengers: Age of Ultron, I walked out of the theater feeling like the survivor of an all-you-can-eat buffet. There are five shock-and-awe action sequences when three would have sufficed. And there are more than a dozen main characters (including a few new ones) all jockeying for screen time when half that number would have already been pushing it. Even the film’s rimshot-ready one-liners have the overkill desperation of a stand-up scared of bombing. Either through his own ambition or the mandate of his corporate overlords, writer-director Joss Whedon simply has too many balls to keep in the air for one movie—even a two-and-a-half-hour one—and you can feel his exhaustion.
The movie wastes no time, kicking off mid-battle as Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, Chris Evans’ Captain America, Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, and the CGI Hulk storm the medieval lair of the last remaining Hydra agent (Thomas Krestchmann’s Baron Strucker), who possesses the glowing Staff of Loki and has nefarious plans for it. There, they encounter a pair of new “enhanced” enemies, the Russky-accented Maximoff twins: Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s blindingly fleet Quicksilver and Elizabeth Olsen’s telekinetic goth chick Scarlet Witch. Or, as Cobie Smulders’ SHIELD agent succinctly describes them, “He’s fast, and she’s weird.” She might have also said, “He’s kinda boring, and she looks like she’d rather be at a Cure concert.” Either way, they’re merely an amuse-bouche for the real baddie to come.
Having recovered Loki’s mystical doodad and its infinity-stone central processor, Downey’s Tony Stark decides to harness its energy to create an army of AI Iron Men to protect the planet from future threats. But his hubris backfires and he gives birth to the evil sentient robot, Ultron, who’s bent on not only taking out the Avengers, but the rest of humanity too. With his smarmy metallic croak, Spader is perfectly cast as the voice of Ultron. So much so that it’s surprising it’s taken this long for someone to tap into the actor’s gift for threateningly bitchy condescension in one of these things. While the gang hopscotches across the globe finding new excuses to face off with Ultron, Whedon does his best to occasionally slow the action down and give us the sort of character moments the film could have used more of. Fans of Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner (for me, the best surprise in the first Avengers) will appreciate his will-they-or-won’t-they flirtation with Johansson’s Black Widow. And there’s a funny bit of cocktail-fueled macho bonding when each of the superheroes takes a stab at lifting Thor’s hammer (unsuccessfully). Even Renner’s Hawkeye, who’s always felt a bit like the sixth wheel of the bunch, gets an unexpected backstory involving a secret family life with a wife (Linda Cardellini) and kids. Who knew that when he wasn’t busy reaching into his quiver, he was moonlighting as Alan Thicke from Growing Pains?
Beyond the core spandex posse, a slew of familiar faces wanders in and out of the picture as if someone back at Marvel HQ were desperate to extend the film’s line of action figures. Still, my real beef with these movies—and this one in particular— is how same-y they’ve started to feel. Each time out, everything is at stake and nothing is at stake. Someone wants to destroy the world, but none of our heroes is ever in any jeopardy. With sequels already lined up for the next decade, how much danger could any of them be in? They’re too valuable to the bottom line. And where’s the excitement in that? B-