Movie of the Week: Avengers - Age of Ultron

[jacey]

It's been a bit of a dry spell at the movies for most of April with hardly anything worth spending money on, especially now we don't get the Orange twofers. When we could see a film on a two-for-one offer then we were more inclined to risk the occasional movie that was outside our usual genre/parameters with the predictable patchy result from the excellent Chef to the appalling A Million ways to Die in the West.

So H and I have been waiting for Avengers - Age of Ultron with some impatience. I'm pleased to say that we were not disappointed. I've said before that I'm not a comic book reader, so though I know the characters I'm not hampered by knowledge of comic-book back-stories or the desire to see those stories faithfully reproduced on screen. If you are a comic book reader, your mileage may vary.

It's always nice to have the characters fleshed out while the action is zooming across the screen. Ultron has plenty of action. It's a mad-scientist-creates-something-bad-by-accident' story. In this case Tony Stark's attempt to invent an artificial intelligence to protect the world goes horribly wrong. But it's not a Tony Stark movie. Joss Whedon manages to give all the major players screen time and character development. It's particularly nice to see Hawkeye, who was largely sidelined in the first Avengers movie, get a life outside of his bow-and-arrow role. Good, too, to see some development for Bruce Banner and Natasha. (But there's no cross-reference to Agents of Shield/Agent Coulson.)

The movie drops us right into the action with the Avengers attacking a Hydra stronghold to retrieve Loki's staff and pretty much goes from set-piece to set-piece with all the usual battle scenes you might expect. There are some new characters introduced to the Avengers universe. (New to me, anyway. Comic book readers will be familiar with them, I believe.) It's darker than the first Avengers movie, but the witty Whedon script delivers a series of excellent one-liners, many in the voice of Ultron (nicely played by James Spader).

Sad that this is (apparently) Whedon's last Avengers/Marvel movie.