Avengers: Age of Ultron is a romantic comedy

In 2012, The Avengers was a mega hit, and the much anticipated sequel is now upon us with Avengers: Age of Ultron opening everywhere at a theatre near you.

Like many, I was pretty geeked out about this upcoming sequel and I’ve been very impressed with how Marvel has created a cinematic universe where each film is connected.

Marvel’s phase two is coming to an end and we are about to enter phase three of their grand master plan for big screen world domination.

Avengers: Age of Ultron was supposed to continue the trend of quality superhero movies, but who knew that instead of a pure action flick what we would end up getting is actually a romantic comedy.

Okay, I’m being a tad facetious but the film had its moments of kick ass action scenes and a lot of bad dialogue and mushyness mixed in. If I wanted a coming of age film with sappiness I’d watch The Age of Adeline.

It appeared that this time around some of the actors wanted more screen time to “act” instead of just being robotic super heroes chiming off one liners and doing scenes in front of green screens.

The previous film was wall-to-wall action with a good story. Avengers: Age of Ultron has an interesting narrative, but like most sequels, it’s bigger, louder and less satisfying than the first film.

In part two, our superhero collective find themselves with Loki’s sceptre from the first film, which just so happens to contain artificial intelligence. Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) believes that the A.I. can be extracted and used to defend the planet from evil aliens and other bad guys. With the help of Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) they take the A.I. and insert it into something called the Ultron program.

However, things don’t go as planned and Ultron decides that it is best that it becomes a savage robot to wreak havoc upon the world. From that point, it’s humans vs. robots as The Avengers deal with internal bickering and new characters like the Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver.

Director Joss Whedon does a great job of packing in a lot of a people into this ambitious $250 million film. The problem is that it feels too clunky and forced. It’s not an easy thing to juggle movie stars, plot points and a massive amount of visual effects; speaking of which, the effects were amazing but you don’t need the 3D glasses.

The story is pretty simplistic and it’s not hard to follow along. It could do without the melodrama and romantic scenes that seemed to go nowhere. Give people more Hulk smash! Not Hulk kissy face.

Whedon, who is walking away from the Marvel universe, did set up the next series of films especially Captain America: Civil War that is set to be released sometime next year.

Overall, Avengers: Age of Ultron is fun and James Spader was great as Ultron. The rest of the cast was pretty meh. I think it had more to do with the script than individual performances. A lot of the lines seemed forced and at times entered cheeseville.

I don’t mind the one liners and the fun dialogue but when you try to force character development into a film that should just be about wall-to-wall action things can get boring really fast.

Many will flock to the theatre today or in the near future to check this film out and I recommend you do so and make your own judgements.

All I will say is lower your expectations. Not every Marvel film is going to be a masterpiece like Guardians of the Galaxy was. But don’t worry, you’ll still enjoy yourself and there are some fun scenes for small nerdgasms. Just make sure you clean up after yourself.

Note: like most of the Marvel films there is an extra scene at the beginning of the credits, but there is no need to stay until the end to see if there is anymore bonus material, because there isn’t any.

I can only give Avengers: Age of Ultron 3.5 rain drops out of 5. I wasn’t super disappointed but when the bar has been raised so high it is rather underwhelming when a sequel can’t be as good if not better than the original.