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As the Marvel Universe expands -- as its projects’ budgets get fatter, their casts thicker, their influence wider -- how good could Avengers: Age of Ultron have really been? Joss Whedon churned out a breezily flexible exercise in the genre with his first Avengers film, but the culture has fundamentally changed since then. The star-studded, deafeningly action-packed superhero blockbuster has emerged as our greatest cinematic constant. And Age of Ultron is a sequel, which means that the expectations for more, more, more are hard to shy away from.
Yet what’s so peculiar and disheartening about this latest entrant in the Marvel canon is the way in which Mr. Whedon attempts to inject a legitimate artistic vision, only for it to be near-literally drowned out by sci-fi jargon, a floating city and a villain who never seems to make much sense. The director has noted that his three-and-a-half hour cut was slashed by just under a third for the final; but even if that information weren’t out there, the incoherence of the film’s character and structural narratives is jarringly obvious. You almost wish that the studio stuck in a filmmaker with less personality or intent, and just let the movie glide through its bombast. Because as it stands, Avengers: Age of Ultron strikes an unsatisfying balance of artistry and commerciality. This is America, after all -- you know what’s going to win out.
The Age of Ultron production is so awesome and clean that to pick at this movie -- guaranteed to cash in billions and ostensibly respectable enough to not alienate critics -- feels like an exercise in futility. The film operates with irritating confidence, its opening sequence a perfect encapsulation. We open in medias res, in the snowy landscape of Eastern Europe. The camerawork is efficient; the production design beyond impressive. We become re-acquainted with our heroes, from their moves to their banter. It’s gutsy, because the main conflict in the film has already been established and we’re not exactly clued into it. You just sort of go with it, the turns in the narrative frequent and expository enough to not completely lose you. They’re fighting Ultron, voiced too sparingly by an in-his-prime James Spader. He’s a sort-of ubiquitous creation, his goal to “Save the world” reachable by killing The Avengers (but he’s misguided!). You never really get a sense of who/what Ultron is, aside from the fact that he can change forms and create a legion of robots to kill mankind. But in The Avengers, it sadly doesn’t matter: Ultron, villain. Villain, bad. City, blown up. Heroes, save it!
Who are those heroes? Robert Downey Jr.’s king-of-snark Tony Stark, or Iron Man; Jeremy Renner’s arrow-slinging Hawkeye; Chris Hemsworth’s other-worldly Thor; Mark Ruffalo’s unendingly-conflicted Bruce Banner, or The Hulk; Chris Evans’ square-jawed Captain America; and Scarlett Johansson’s enigmatic Black Widow, a “professional assassin” who, due to a combination of the actress’ pregnancy and the character’s relative lack of definition, gets very little to do in this installment. Oh, but there are many more famous faces who pop in and out like a highlight real. In fact, the whole movie does. Age of Ultron doesn’t progress with any actual momentum. It goes from scene-to-scene; a character-focused one here, three blow-shit-up ones there. That balance isn’t exactly abnormal, or even inherently bad, for a movie like this. The problem is that this is nothing more than a collection of scenes, to the point where it’s almost condescending. Age of Ultron is committed to throwing you in the middle of it, defying cinematic conventions. But it’s not bold; it’s nonsense. There’s no understanding of tension or escalation here, no reason to invest beyond its superficial value. It’s astonishingly monotonous.
There’s a big difference between number of complications and level of complexity. Age of Ultron is not especially smart, and digging into it to understand what’s going on is less an intellectual task and more an attempt to fill in serious narrative holes. The movie is so immersive visually that it appears content to not tell an actual story -- and this extends to the character arcs. Mr. Whedon’s attempts at infusing the film with depth and complexity turn embarrassingly underdeveloped. The film alludes to Tony Stark’s paralleled sense of justice with Ultron’s; that his idea of destruction and saving are one-in-the-same. But it gets dropped, abruptly and obviously, with the film pushing on through like it doesn’t matter. Ultron's uniqueness as a villain, at least viewed from the exterior, is the threat he poses to the Avengers themselves. But the demands of commercial moviemaking make it so Whedon can't follow through with this conceit (Stark's random retribution being a nice example of this). It's where the deep frustration comes from: respect for the audience’s intelligence is often nonexistent. “Just go with it” is such an overriding message that it’s punishing. As for the other characters, Captain America flashes back to 1945 before realizing all he can do is avenge. Bruce Banner goes through the exact same internal conflict as in the first Avengers, struggling to control his anger and negotiate his role in the actual team. Thor finds a new, powerful stone by reuniting with Stellan Skarsgard. The Black Widow talks about “disappearing.” And bizarrely, Samuel L. Jackson and SHIELD come back as powerful and respectable as ever, with Captain America’s inspirational “This is what SHIELD is supposed to be” apparently sufficient explanation as to why.
Oh, and Hawkeye has a secret family! Linda Cardellini, who’s been busy reminding people what a terrific actress she is on TV’s Bloodline and Mad Men, gets handed a pathetically underwritten part as the hidden wife in question. She lives on a farm, says nice things like “You know I support your avenging” and asks her superhero houseguests to chop wood and fix her tractor. It’s never, at all, clear why Cardellini lives in isolation with her children on a farm. But her character’s paper-thin realization does point to the film’s broader woman problem, which normally wouldn’t bother me much but, hey, there’s a lot here that just doesn’t work. Johansson gets saddled in a bland romantic subplot with Ruffalo, while Elizabeth Olsen’s introduction as the Scarlet Witch is undercut severely because of her direction to do a Russian accent, and failing miserably. (Olsen is a very good actress, by the way.)
It’s worth pointing out this lopsided gender balance only because it works as a specific example of the film’s broader issue with human interaction. Unlike the first Avengers, the rapid-fire banter and non-avenging scenes feel seriously forced. A running gag about Captain America’s correction of Iron Man’s profanity is never funny, and these actors simply lack chemistry. It’s hardly surprising. To plop a bunch of A-list actors into a movie already suffering from being overstuffed is bound to lead to some awkwardness. But while Avengers milked this awkwardness for great laughs -- anyone remember that classic post-credits scene? -- Age of Ultron seems to imply that in the time between films, they’ve become nicely acquainted. It doesn’t work, save a moment or two like the Thor Hammer contest, and that’s especially because we don’t really care about these characters as, well, characters. Downey Jr. is in his own world of snark, which is getting tiresome. Evans is a cipher, not really leaving any sort of impression. Renner and Ruffalo, the best actors of the bunch, seem content to phone it in and pick up their paycheck. Every one-liner made mid-action is delivered with the same self-satisfied tone, as if these characters are endearing and humane enough for us to care. In Age of Ultron, that’s the biggest miscalculation: our relationship to these characters. This film can never come close to the buddy comedy it occasionally aspires to, if only because it has to meet its action quota.
Avengers: Age of Ultron does its homework, of course. For fans of the comics, or these characters, there’s more than enough to chew on. But this is also a movie, and its blatant ignorance of the many flaws present here point to an arrogance. Not in Mr. Whedon, whose aspirations are certainly evident, however buried and ultimately misguided. But narratively, the movie is worse than incoherent: it’s completely, knowingly forgettable. It doesn’t seem to matter. The goal is to spend two and a half hours with a bunch of our most recognizable actors, bantering and fighting and doing whatever else.
That does not make a movie. But even if it did, Avengers: Age of Ultron can’t get that right. The action is merely accepted: cities and villages get destroyed without so much as a moment of reflection. It’s all part of the equation, all by now rendered digestible. But between the lines, Age of Ultron is empty bombast, complicated but not complex, unconventional but not bold, loud but not purposefully so. It doesn’t matter, though -- the next sequel is already in the works, and hundreds of millions are already in the bank. At least Whedon found a way out.
Grade: D+