It's no secret that I loved Marvel Comics when I was a kid. I spent a lot of the 60s and 70s reading them. Apart from a brief dalliance with the Walt Simonson reboot of Thor in the mid-80s, I have been a comic-free zone for the past thirty years.
Keeping up with the goings-on in the Marvel universe used to be an expensive business - there were so many titles to buy and so little money to spare. The lovely thing nowadays is that one can dip back into the Marvel universe via their movies. For the cost of a couple cinema tickets every year, we can catch up with our old favourites and see where the scriptwriters' imaginations are going to take us.
Not all Marvel Studio movies are equal, and we all have our druthers. I enjoyed the first Avengers movie. The latest installment, Avengers: Age of Ultron, was not so much to my taste, being disappointing rather than unenjoyable.
Why is this so? We can rule out performance. All the actors involved bring their characters to life in a credible manner. The various sub-plots that run through the movie allow some of them - Bruce Banner/Hulk, Natasha Romanov/Black Widow and Clint Barton/Hawkeye - to reveal more of their inner-civilians (although I will leave it to feminists to go to town on the sub-text of Nat's back-story). We can also rule out the devilish magnitude of the bad guy's schemes: this one is about as devilish as it gets.
No, in the end (and I am sorry to say) it all boils down to the quality of the baddie. The first episode of the franchise had the beguiling Loki, wonderfully portrayed by Tom Hiddleston. This episode has Ultron - a self-aware robot who plays the Monster to Tony Stark/Iron Man's Dr Frankenstein. Nice idea, but the realisation of Ultron as a potent character falls short of the mark (no fault of James Spader, who provided the voice). I'll leave that as an assertion rather than give out spoilers to support it. Let's just say that Ultron's female collaborator had the makings of a far more intriguing and terrifying baddie.
The special effects and design are top notch, marred only by repetitious and prolonged action sequences. The dialogue sparkles from time to time, marred only by repetitious and prolonged action sequences. Those who like action sequences will get their money's worth, but those of us who prefer to be thrilled by plot developments may feel a little short-changed. Swings and roundabouts, I guess.
Avengers: Age of Ultron - go see it if you like the Marvel thang. Not nearly the best from their stable of movies, not nearly the worst either.
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