The Avengers reassemble for the
second of writer-director Joss Whedon’s superhero synergasms. Success is
inevitable. But is the film any good?
The
trouble with these Avengers get-togethers, it transpires, is not just that
they’re too big to fail, but that they’re almost certainly too big to function
as drama. Swallowing up every last character, actor and dollar, the franchise
has thus far manifested itself as the lumbering ne plus ultra of modern movie gigantism, while the Avengers
themselves – the hall of superhero fame headed by Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man
and Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk – remain the safest of bets, covering so many
eventualities that their triumph is all but assured.
In
pre-release interviews, writer-director Joss Whedon has cited this sequel as
the hardest work he’s ever done, and you can bet most of that toil went on
finding an antagonist capable of making any fight seem fair enough for an audience
to reasonably cheer. Here, he’s settled on Ultron, which may sound like a brand
of dishwasher tablets, but is actually an artificial intelligence (voiced by
James Spader) with an army of robots at his disposal. It’s superheroes versus
supercomputer, then; of human interest, there is little-to-nothing.
This
tussle sends more computer-generated masonry flying than ever, which is an
achievement of sorts, but the expensive kit and relentless set-pieces mask a
playground-level goodies-vs.-baddies runaround. Proper actors are bought in to
bolster the beef/cheesecake, yet the two-second appearance of arthouse muse
Julie Delpy doing nothing is both a jolting incongruity and a suggestion that
all resistance to this behemoth cinema might be futile. They can’t claim the
script attracted them: Whedon’s drama is banal, his wisecracks composed of
deadening snark.
By all
means claim Age of Ultron as fun, but it looks very much like the kind of fun
the suits want you to have – an utterly impersonal, corporate triumph. Watching
these logo-simple characters (the starred shield, the arm-and-hammer, the
not-so-jolly green giant), I wondered whether we weren’t meant to be cheering
for the likes of Marvel, Disney, Google, Apple and Coca-Cola as they boosted
their global market share. Put your pennies in these deep pockets, by all
means, but my instinct would be to sit out any fight that is so obviously and
expensively rigged.
Avengers: Age of Ultron is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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