Avengers: Age of Ultron, May 2o15

Like every other comic book/film geek in the universe I was pawing at the ground just waiting for Avengers: Age of Ultron to hit the movie houses. Get this! David and I were so pumped to see this flick that we got up early enough to catch an 8:30am showing at the Regal Spotlight! And we weren’t the only ones. Fast head count in the dark, there were at least three other fans who braved the early morning just to see the sequel to one of Marvel’s biggest movies, The Avengers! And after 2hrs and 21min of almost nonstop action, I can say whole heartedly that this movie was . . . okay. Yeah, you heard me, it was okay but it did suffer somewhat from a mild case of:

 

MSS (Matrix Sequel Syndrome)

 

You remember The Matrix (1999), right, that kick-ass little fantasy/action film by the Wachowskis that took Hollywood by its box office receipts and sent all us action geeks running to the closest theater showing it. And WOW! What great action! What great fight scenes! And I remember when the Wachowskis won best picture at the MTV Movie Awards, one of them smiled at us real big and said, “You liked this movie? You ain’t seen nothing yet!” And lo, they madest two sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolution, and guess what? We had seen their “something yet,” and it was called, The Matrix (1999). Yeah, pretty much both sequels were about the same as the original The Matrix . . . just bigger, faster and cluttered to hell with uninspired action scenes.

 

And that’s the problem with Age of Ultron; we’ve seen pretty much all the action sequences before in the original The Avengers. Remember the cool fight scene in A1, Thor vs Hulk? Well, the second action scene in Ultron is Ironman vs. Hulk. Granted, it was a longer action sequence than in A1, but virtually the same except that the battle Between I & H was sped up so fast that it looked like blurry globs of red and green mashed potatoes whizzing across the screen!

 

And do you remember the great climactic war at the end of Avengers 1 where our heroes kick the crap out of Loki’s inept alien army? If you didn’t see it, no worries because the opening scene to Age of Ultron has the Avengers fighting an inept  army of puny humans . . . and again, if you missed that cause you were dipping into your popcorn barrel instead of paying attention to the movie. . . no worries. The final battle has the Avengers kicking the crap out of Ultron’s inept army of robots. Now, you’d think that at least one of those smart villains would have figured, “Hmmm, these Avenger guys are tough cookies! Maybe I should create a less wimpy army?”

 

To give Age of Ultron some credit, the writers did try to create a few scenes that had

something more to offer than the Avengers kicking bad guys’ bottoms and saving the world (again) from total annihilation:

 

Natasha and Bruce Love Scene (paraphrase)

Natasha: Hey, Bruce wanna hook up?

Bruce: Well, I can’t have kids.
Natasha: Neither can I.
Bruce: Well, then, maybe we shouldn’t.
Natasha: (catch in her voice) Oh, okay.

 

Or how about that heated moral debate over the creation of AI?

 

Bruce and Tony moral Debate (paraphrase)

Tony: I’m gonna create Artificial Intelligence!

Bruce: That would be immoral!

Tony: I’m gonna do it anyway.
Bruce: (catch in his voice) Oh, okay.

 

There are so many subplots going on in this movie (Hawkeye and his secret family, the love triangle between Natasha, Banner and Cap, The backstory of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, etc.) that there’s no time to explore any of them in depth, so they come off as being totally artificial and lacking a real sense of life.

 

But that’s cool, right, ‘cause the only reason we go to see this type of movie is for the “KICK-ASS” action scenes, right? Well, maybe not. I’m pretty sure that most of us want a bit more story and a lot less of the amateurish, CGI hokum that the directors and producers force on us movie after movie, after movie . . .