by Francis Friel

Synopsis:

Tony Stark creates an AI army, immediately regrets it. Banner and Romanoff are suddenly in love or something. Thor has a Vision. Steve Rogers does some stuff. Nick Fury. Hawkeye. Scarlet Witch. Quicksilver. Reunited and it feels so fucking loooooooong.

Review:

No, like realllllly long. Was this movie four hours long? I swear to god, these things just get more and more unwieldy and fanboys will scream and yell that Whedon is a god who can do no wrong but just judging from his own statements recently, this is barely his film to begin with (if there was ever any doubt). I bet he's wishing he'd pulled an Edgar Wright at this point. 

Anyhoot: James Spader pretty much pulls the roof off this thing from the get-go. People keep talking about how bad his performance is, the puns, the evil genius dialog, but honestly it's what kept me interested in the story (such as it was) when things got sloppy (which was constantly). With this many characters to keep track of, no one storyline gets the heft it deserves, so it was at least nice to know someone in there was having a good time, and Spader seems like he had a blast.

The story itself was doomed from the start, as it makes the classic mistake of completely missing its own point. How long was this "age" of Ultron, exactly? I was getting DARK KNIGHT RISES deja vu. Bruce Wayne's in retirement after eight years, no one's seen the Batman in all that time, and he's become a legend. But how long was he running around as Batman? The Joker storyline kicks in at the end of BEGINS, then we get the DARK KNIGHT story, which lasts, what, a few weeks? Was there even such a thing as a Batman for more than, like, two months? If that? This film has the same problem. I have no idea how dire things were getting mostly because I had no idea what the stakes ever really were. It seems like this whole problem was created and then solved in a matter of days? Is that not right? It's hard to tell. And hard to keep up with because, again, there's a million goddamn Avengers to deal with. And what are they Avenging, exactly? Jon Favreau's career arc?

Classic characters from the comics kinda just show up randomly, others are seemingly tossed in just so they'll have something to do in later films with minimal backstory obligations to attend to.... It just all feels so forced. I keep waiting for Marvel to truly throw us a curveball and start inventing brand new characters that exist solely in the MCU, and aren't tied to existing properties. They've toyed around with some origin stories here and there, or combined characters and traits as they need for the purposes of these scripts (and rights issues), but a film focusing on brand new characters would be great if only to calm the storm of shit they'll inevitably get when they "ruin" the wrong character.

The thing about all these heroes all assembled is that everything that happens becomes kinda meaningless in the process. Any one of them could have solved this thing all by themselves, as evidenced by the fact (much pointed-out) that they all have stand-alone stories where they're the only heroes in sight. Why assemble at all? Why does Nick Fury even care anymore? How can he know for sure, for sure, that one of them isn't secretly working for Hydra? Or brainwashed, at any given time? Or just working for some other secret agenda that'll surely get ret-conned into the framework of the MCU somewhere down the road? It's just hard to care much at this point.

Marvel's genius is its downfall, in that in getting us all excited for the coming Civil War (not to mention the freaking Infinity War), this whole Age of Ultron feels like a placeholder. Get everybody into place, get everybody bickering, or in love, so they can be all set up to knock down again in a couple years. And again, that's after we meet Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, Black Panther, and whoever the hell else is gonna get shoved down our throats by Disney. It's bonkers, this release plan. And it hurts every individual film in the process.

Bob Gale said "sequels aren't art, they're merchandise." And while we didn't need Gale to tell us, exactly, it's best to keep that in mind going forward with this series. Marvel knows what it's doing. DC is scrambling to even begin to figure out how to do this shit properly (they can start by not saddling a single director with creating the entire universal aesthetic, a huge mistake if you ask me). At a certain point, Marvel is gonna start running out of steam. For one thing, where's this all supposed to end? Where is it leading? Is Phase Three the end of the line? If so, the current line-up of product looks extremely random.

It's crazy to think that, kind of out of nowhere, the STAR WARS franchise (also by Disney) is showing Marvel how it's done by simply releasing a list of titles with no info whatsoever as to what these films are even gonna be about. 

As it stands, REVENGERS: AGENT VOLTRON is the worst of the current crop of Marvel movies. Well, maybe not as bad as THE FIRST AVENGER, but pretty bad.

The one bright spot for me, other than Spader, was the Vision, particularly a scene towards the end, in the woods with Ultron. It had the kind of weird, out-of-the-blue weight to it that I remember feeling in the Dr. Manhattan origin sequence from WATCHMEN. Just a great moment in the middle of a movie that probably didn't deserve it. Although, for the record, I love WATCHMEN.

And I want these movies to be good! I really do! When I was a little kid I wanted everything to be a movie. 

See what happens when you want things?

Overall Score: ?????