Ultron is so packed with avenging, even its characters yearn for peace and quiet
Avengers: Age of Ultron
(out of 5)
Starring: Robert Downey Jr., James Spader, Chris Hemsworth Directed by: Joss Whedon
Running time: 141 minutes
We are rapidly reaching the point in the Marvel-verse where late arrivals will have to study sheaves of comic books and sit through a few of the early movies just to make sense of the latest offering. And even that may not be enough, much in the way that Introduction to the Novel doesn’t actually make James Joyce any easier to read.
But far be it for a critic to admit he doesn’t know why Thor wanders off to a cave in this one, or where Sokovia is and whether we should worry about it being annexed by Russia, or for what reason the new character Vision feels the need to grow a cape, or even who Vision is in the first place.
The best one can hope for is that the various Avengers’ offhand, jokey explanations will provide reliable intel. For instance, a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent (Cobie Smulders) helpfully describes newcomers Quicksilver and Scarlett Witch: “He’s fast and she’s weird.”
And Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), briefly down from being the Hulk, calls their latest adversary “Murder-bot.”
Its real name is Ultron, but that sounds like something that wants to remove 98 per cent of grease and grime, not 100 per cent of human life on Earth.
Ultron is neither the first nor last artificial intelligence to lumber across screens this summer. See Chappie, Ex Machina, Terminator Genisys and, stretching the definition a little, Ted 2.
But as voiced by James Spader he is arguably the funniest, though Ted may yet prove stiff competition. Relieving a human adversary of a limb, Ultron seems briefly taken aback and softly consoles his victim: “I think that’ll be fine.”
Ultron is created when Tony Stark — who seems congenitally incapable of finding two things and not wanting to stick them together — gets hold of Loki’s magic sceptre from the last Avengers film and connects it to a peacekeeping AI he’s been noodling with.
The resulting entity escapes through the Internet — when will people learn to close that thing? — and starts replicating itself all over the world. (Even the fictional bits like Sokovia.)
Cue the Avengers, who must put aside their bickering and sexual tensions — or at least sublimate them — by, you know, avenging. The central cast includes Hulk, Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Captain America (Chris Evans).
There are also a number of secondary retaliators — so many, in fact, that by the end of the film the group has split up and reformed, not unlike Broken Social Scene.
It’s a busy movie, sometimes briefly introducing villains — Thomas Kretschmann as the be-monacled Strucker; Andy Serkis as arms dealer Ulysses Klaue; Stan Lee as a cranky Second World War veteran — only to smack them out of the frame again.
But the basic gist is easy enough to follow, even if most of the battle scenes, shot in a barrage of quick cuts and extreme close-ups, feel like watching a rugby match from inside the ball. Ultron goes from consciousness to God complex so fast it’ll bring you to your knees, which is precisely what it wants.
It even quotes Scripture, which is actually more tasteful than the sly rape joke delivered by Stark, and familiar to fans of Braveheart. Captain America balances things somewhat with his 1940s prudery, warning his comrades to tone down the language.
Age of Ultron isn’t literally an age, though at 141 minutes it does go on. There’s a big battle between an angry Hulk and Stark in a superIron-Man suit, which the periodic table would suggest makes him Osmium Man. There’s also a showdown between Ultron and Vision that has a distinct Batman vs. Superman feel: Nothing like stealing the other guys’ thunder.
But there are a few softer scenes as well. Writer-director Joss Whedon, who’s been running the Avengers franchise on the big screen, and, in the form of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., on the small one for several years now, features segments in which some of what might be deemed lesser Avengers, yearn for a little peace and quiet.
That might just be Whedon’s own wishes trickling into the script. But as the inevitable end-credits tease informs us: The Avengers will return. Nice to know there are some things of which we can be certain.