Is it possible to do justice to a review when one must confess that they fell asleep three times during the watching?
Thank goodness for all of the loud explosions and incomprehensibly shouted dialogue. If not for those elements, I most likely would have slept through the whole thing.
(Might be spoilers below, if so, I don’t care as this is a film that spoilers can neither ruin nor save.)
I’d say that Marvel Studios has firmly planted their flag on the younger set demographic – the audience that doesn’t really seem to care about plot as long as characters in interesting costumes are shown performing physically impossible feats at a frenetic pace.
So, we’ve got Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Black Widow, Captain America and whatshisname – Hawkeye, plus, eventually, Nick Fury and War Machine – already far too many “main” characters for a two hour flick to do justice to any of them, and the film eventually introduces Quicksilver, Scarlet Witch, Vision, Ultron, and a host of new Avengers at the very end.
We’ve got a plot that gets lost almost immediately following the opening scene (Scarlet Witch appears to mentally screw with Tony Stark, causing him to want to create Ultron, but later we hear absolutely nothing about this when it is instead turned into Tony’s lack of respect for teamwork that brings about Ultron…
Ultron appears to be a meaner Tony Stark, but without any of the charm. The artificial intelligence is so intent on delivering good one-liners that you absolutely know he’s not going to win from the first moment he opens his mouth.
Anything else I’d say from this point on would be snark piled on top of more snark. So I’ll leave it with this: The Avengers: Age of Ultron will leave no trace in the geologic record. The acting – they all turned in a performance. The plot – virtually nonexistent beyond “good guys create a bad guy, everyone fights, good guys win”; an overwhelming, frenetic and largely lost amount of CGI – so much so that Marvel could save itself a bunch of sheckels and just animate the whole damned thing. This film was probably a necessary story to tell, but for me, it strongly suggests that the chrome is beginning to come off the bumpers.
But what do I know, I slept through a good portion of it!
