...or as I like to call it, the beginning of the end...
This movie was a true disappointment to me. There, I said it, it won't be a popular sentiment nor will it be shared by the general public, but that's my opinion. AoU is too big for its own britches. Gone are the tightly woven character threads coming together to form a cohesive fighting unit, the compelling villain with the power to go up against Earth's mightest, and any sense of focus among all of these elements. The closest analogy I can come up with is that Joss Whedon had an immense checklist and went one by one down said list as he threw in the next item, regardless of its implications to the story or any impetus for its inclusion. I'll just list a few things...
The visions / mind control / inclusion of the twins - Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver: So from Tony Stark's vision of a defeated/dead Avengers team by an unseen foe, he totally disregards every prior warning from the previous Iron Man film (granted I have not seen it) and goes behind his team's back and creates the Ultron program. Not very smart, Tony. At least CONSULT the others first, or study and augment the program before unleashing it. Every villain uses mind control to thwart the Avengers - really? The twins just seem to be there, with no real reason for having them...they could have substituted 15 other superhero/mutants and it wouldn't have made any difference. And that was a TERRIBLE accent, Elizabeth Olsen.
Ultron - much like last year's letdown, Godzilla, if you're going to have a superior actor (voice talent) USE THEM for God's sake. Spader is perfect for this role, and when he is showcased, he is clearly magnificent. There just isn't enough of him in this film. One minute he is a hammy, joke cracking sentinel...the next he is supposed to be the ultimate in AI evil, existing everywhere on the planet and in cyberspace. Pick one or the other. And we get it, after the tenth time saying it during the film, there are no strings on you...and for a bad guy to be so powerful, he repeatedly gets his metal ass handed to him by whatever Avenger he's fighting in a given scene.
The action is furious and over-CGI'd to the point where the mega battles become - dare I say it - BORING. There is no dramatic end game to it all, it's just boss fight after boss fight as they change scenery from one to the next. Vision gets created three quarters of the way through, and basically sets up another new plot thread for the next set of movies. Banner, Black Widow and Hawkeye get some appreciable character building, but it is at the expense of momentum halting plot lines that are jarring and serve no purpose other than to take you completely out of the frantic action pieces. Again, the problem of lost focus rears its ugly head here. We even get a secondary character death during the climax that is so out of left field. It screams of "well we need to kill one of these guys" and off they went. We want to see Ultron and his minions wrecking havoc and becoming an ultimate cyber-enemy like those trailers promised, instead we get everything and the kitchen sink, including a Hulk love affair and Thor taking a bath...WTF?!
I'm being incredibly harsh, but I hate to see so much wasted potential. The cast is still fine and have their moments, only most of those result in cheeky one-liners repeatedly thrown in for comedic effect. Whedon established a great world and tone in the first one, now it's all over the place. An age old proverb came to mind:
Just because you can do a thing, doesn't mean that you must do that thing.
The shine on the Marvel universe is definitely off for me. I loved The Winter Soldier last year, but this is just a mess of gargantuan proportions. Perhaps Cap: Civil War will be better and save the Marvel franchise from completely falling off the cliff? Reign it in, folks.
1.5 out of 5 Khans.
