Three years ago Marvel put six heroes in a room and made the impossible look easy. I walked out of the first Avengers convinced they’d cracked something. So I want to be careful about how I say this, because I don’t want it read as backlash for its own sake: Age of Ultron is a step down. It’s bigger than the first film in every measurable way and a worse movie for almost all of them.
It isn’t bad. I need to be clear about that up front. It’s a perfectly good time at the theater. But three weeks and two viewings later, the thing I keep landing on is that it’s a sequel doing everyone else’s job except its own.
Crushed under the setup
You can feel the machinery this time. The first Avengers had exactly one task: get these people together and make it click. This one has a to-do list a mile long. Introduce Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver. Build Vision from scratch. Drop hints about those Infinity Stones the post-credits scenes keep teasing. Detour Thor into a random cave vision that stops the movie cold to gesture at films we haven’t seen yet. Quietly start driving a wedge between Tony and Steve for whatever’s coming next year.
That’s a lot of freight for one film, and none of it is the actual story. The first movie was lean because it was allowed to be. This one is bloated because it’s been handed the job of connecting a dozen other movies to each other, and connective tissue is not the same thing as a plot. Half the runtime is homework, and homework doesn’t have stakes.
They wasted Ultron
This is the part I can’t let go of. Ultron should be terrifying. The premise is genuinely frightening: a machine built to protect the world decides the only way to save humanity is to end it. James Spader’s voice is perfect for it, all silk and quiet menace. And the movie hands that character the exact same wisecracking rhythm as the heroes he’s supposed to loom over.
An Ultron who trades quips isn’t scary. He’s just one more guy in the banter economy. They built a world-ending intelligence and then wrote him like a snarky uncle, and every time he edges toward being truly unsettling he undercuts himself with a joke. Not once did I believe he might actually win, and a villain you can’t imagine losing to is just an obstacle course with a good voice.
The good stuff, because it’s not all grim
I don’t want to bury what works, and plenty does. The opening raid on the Hydra fortress, one long unbroken shot of all six Avengers fighting in sync, is the best “these people are a real unit now” moment the franchise has managed. It cashes in three years of goodwill in a single sequence.
The party scene is a delight. Everyone taking a turn trying to lift Thor’s hammer is precisely the kind of small character beat these enormous movies usually forget to include, and Cap nudging it a hair while Thor’s face falls is perfect. Vision’s arrival and his simple “I am on the side of life” is a real high point, and Paul Bettany walks off with every scene he touches. And Hawkeye, mercifully, finally gets an inner life and a family and something to do, after spending the last movie as a mind-controlled prop. Renner earns it.
There’s a sharper, smaller film buried in here about a team that can’t trust its own smartest members. Tony builds the thing that nearly ends the world because he’s frightened, and that’s a strong, human idea. The movie just never gets to sit with it, because it has fourteen other errands to run first.
Sokovia is New York with the color drained out
The finale is where the seams show worst. A floating city, an army of identical faceless robots, a glowing MacGuffin that has to be protected. It’s the Battle of New York again with the life bled out of it. Endless drones are the laziest possible enemy, because there’s nothing to fear from a thing with no face and no plan, and swapping Chitauri for Ultron sentries changed the paint and nothing underneath.
Whedon clearly wants to keep the human cost visible, and the evacuation beats are reaching for the same legibility that made the first film’s climax sing. But everything is so much bigger now that one city no longer reads as intimate, and the movie can’t decide whether it’s personal or apocalyptic, so it lands as neither.
Where it lands
Put the two Avengers films side by side and it isn’t close for me. The original is tighter, funnier, and far more joyful, and it had the discipline to be about one thing. This one is stuck in the middle doing setup, mistaking “important to the larger plan” for “good on its own.”
The box office is telling the same story in its own language. It opened huge, second only to the first film, but the drop-off since has been steeper and the conversation around it noticeably cooler. The critics have landed a good deal softer on it too, and that gap from the first film feels right to me, not like fan nitpicking.
None of this makes it a bad night out. It makes it the lesser Avengers movie, the one where you can see the machine grinding away behind the curtain. For a series that made its name hiding exactly that machinery, that’s the harshest thing I can say. You can see the work.