Share This Article:
by 
Return to Silver Screen Central Home page
The un-Hulked version of Mark Ruffalo has a new love interest
CHow far has Marvel’s Avengers franchise fallen in the over loud, overlong, underwhelming sequel Avengers: Age of Ultron? So far that the best thing the movie has going for it is an actor whose face doesn’t appear onscreen for one single second but, without whom, the film would be close to unwatchable.
This time around, the Avengers (a collection of pretty much all the Marvel superheroes to which Disney owns the film rights) take on a highly advanced robot gone haywire, voiced by James Spader. Ultron was created by Tony Stark, aka Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) to protect the earth from the types of supervillains who usually show up in these movies, but Ultron instead decides to destroy mankind with the help of an army of minion robots. Naturally, his plan, which involves making a large city rise thousands of feet in the air in agonizingly slow motion before crashing back to earth, allows the heroes plenty of time to stop him.
The majority of Avengers: Age of Ultron‘s running time consists of the heroes either blasting inept robot minions to bits or trying to rescue inept trapped human extras in peril. With the exception of one good fight between Iron Man and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo plays the un-Hulked Bruce Banner), these scenes are virtually interchangeable and eventually rather boring. Even Ultron himself, except for Spader’s droll quips, isn’t that challenging an adversary. Ironically, the film’s most interesting sequence involves its least powerful superhero, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), who turns out to have a wife and kids at home. The movie’s other attempt to introduce a new storyline, involving a romance between Banner and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) fails miserably when it adds in a scene of her tending to the Hulk that’s a direct ripoff of King Kong. Instead of a real plot, writer/director Joss Whedon supplies an abundance of banter, mostly from Downey, Ruffalo, and Chris Evans (as Captain America), that plays like outtakes from a final season episode of Cheers. James Spader’s remarkably charismatic villain makes almost all of Ultron’s scenes entertaining, but the rest of Avengers: Age of Ultron provides far too much bang and too little real bite for the buck.
In this scene, James Spader’s Ultron explains his plan to confederates Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). Our full review of Avengers: Age of Ultron is now available on Silver Screen Cinema.
Photo credit: “Mark Ruffalo” by Gage Skidmore / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0
Follow Us:
by
