Avengers: Age of Ultron

A long form review originally posted in 2015: I’ve just returned from two back-to-back viewings of Avengers: Age of Ultron, and I do not regret one bit going in for that second helping. I lost my steam on the Age of Ultron wagon at a very inopportune moment. About three days before it came out. I was so heavily anticipating it for such a long time, that I was actually much more excited to see this movie when it was still two months away than I was waiting in line to get into the cinema it was playing at. The combination of the market-saturation and the fact that the Ultron hype-train has been running for literally years, with a first trailer dropping seven months before the damn thing came out, meant I got weary of the thing just a fraction too soon. But I’m a sucker for the MCU, and there was no way I was missing the sequel to my favourite superhero movie of all time. I won’t harp on...

This is another one of those movies that you watch primarily for the special effects with you favourite super heroes slugging it out. It is a classical Hollywood product where the story is mostly there just as a vehicle for allowing the special effects team to do their business. As such it is a success. The movie starts of with a display of action and the afore mentioned special effects with an attack by the Avengers on a bad guy stronghold. Not surprisingly the events sows the seeds for things to come. The movie starts off with quite an interesting story idea with the activation of Ultron. However, once he materializes as a physical entity, it became a bit of seen that, been there and done that. Ultron just turns into yet another “standard” comic book villain a’ la Megatron running around trying to look intimidating while implementing his diabolical scheme. Okay, there was a bit of...

Action, good Fx and a "not-completely-absurd" story. The actors perform well and you can identify them very well with their characters ... but it is all old and without imagination. I suppose nobody was expecting anything else, though ...

There is a lot going on in this movie but it all just seemed kind of pointless and dull to me. Every now and then there would be a good scene or piece of dialogue but for the most part I felt myself getting bored and reaching for my phone to play Cribbage. I guess what I didn't like most is that it all felt like a big filler episode instead of an action packed character driven story arc.