Out TAKE Stan Lee, 92-year-old creator of the Avengers, always takes a cameo in the films. Here, he pops up as a drunken WWII veteran at a party

WHen nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), eyepatched mentor to the planet’s mightiest superheroes, declares in Avengers: Age Of Ultron that ‘we have nothing but our wit and our will to save the world’, he’s fibbing, just a bit.

A reported budget of more than a quarter-of-a-billion dollars comes in rather handy, too, enabling writer-director Joss Whedon to pull off one of the most extravagant contests of Good versus evil ever to unfold on a cinema screen.

extravagant, but not always coherent. As so often with these computer-generated blockbusters, the narrative often plays second fiddle to the spectacle and, sometimes, second fiddle is drowned out altogether by synthesisers at full blast. It’s a very loud film, yet mostly shot in genteel Middlesex at Shepperton Studios.

Whatever, fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — the mindbogglingly lucrative film franchise based on Marvel Comics characters — will love this latest adventure.

It loosely adheres to the age-old theme of a good monster turned bad, though the monster is, in this case, a rogue robot, the fiendishly powerful Ultron (James Spader), conceived as a global peace-keeping programme, only to use all its artificial intelligence to reach the conclusion that humans in general, and superheroes in particular, need wiping out.

In this inglorious project, he is assisted by two newcomers to the superhero/supervillain genre — a pair of vengeful orphans from the fictional country of Sokovia to whom special powers have been gifted. Scarlet Witch (elizabeth Olsen) can bend minds and Quicksilver (Aaron TaylorJohnson) can move at the speed of light.

All this adds up to a considerable challenge for our familiar platoon of caped, masked and otherwise accessorised crusaders, one that even Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) thinks might actually be beyond them, though no such doubts afflict the perpetually angry Hulk (Mark Ruffalo). In any case, he — or, rather, his gentle alterego Bruce Banner — has other matters on his mind, notably a stilted, rather touching romance with Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson).

It is in these quieter moments that Whedon, who also wrote and directed