Review: The Avengers: Age of Ultron

In the science of cuteness, there's a thing called "stacking." If a kitten is cute, a duckling on top of a kitten is even cuter. A duckling on top of a kitten on top of a puppy? Cuteness nirvana.

The same rule applies, apparently, to superheroes. One superhero: good. Six superheroes: Now we're really talking! So we get The Avengers, where all your Marvel faves team up and become super friends.

I liked the first The Avengers very much and marveled at writer/director Joss Whedon's ability to create distinct characters and personal stakes amid all the computer-generated action. The same is more or less true of The Avengers: The Age of Ultron, even though, for me at least, the novelty of seeing these caped (and cat-suited and masked and hulked) crusaders all together has worn off a bit.

One of the problems with The Avengers: The Age of Ultron is that most of the heroes already have their own franchises, leaving us with lots of complex back stories to contend with. In one awkward scene, Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) have to explain why their respective girlfriends are nowhere to be found (guess Gwyneth Paltrow and Natalie Portman were busy). So maybe it's no surprise that Joss Whedon has the most fun with two new characters—Russian twins Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who start out as formidable enemies and ultimately join forces with our heroes—as well as some of the core Avengers who don't have their own franchises: Jeremy Renner's Hawkeye, Scarlett Johannson's Black Widow, and Mark Ruffalo's The Hulk. (Yes, there were two mediocre Hulk movies, but neither is part of this particular Marvel Groupon, as it were.) Black Widow and the Hulk have a nascent romance—they're drawn to each other since both are dealing with guilt and fear surrounding their own propensity for violence; and Hawkeye is given a surprising backstory of his own, not to mention some of the film's best quips. ("The city is flying, we're fighting an army of robots, and I have a bow and arrow! None of this makes sense!" he aptly notes at one point.)

As for the film's plot, I'll give it a whirl: Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man, goes slightly rogue and tries to build a super artificial intelligence to save mankind. Instead, it backfires and he creates a killing machine named Ultron (James Spader), bent on global destruction, who is basically his own wisecracking doppelganger. As if Starks' foiled plan weren't bad enough, the aforementioned Scarlet Witch has used mind control to conjure up each Avenger's worst nightmare, most of which we get to see depicted on screen. Some are more clear than others: Stark's nightmare is causing the death of his friends; Black Widow's nightmare is a recollection of her training as a killing machine; and the nightmare of Chris Evans's Captain America's is…a 1940s swing dance party? (Yeah, yeah, I get it. A happier, more innocent time he can never return to.)

Once again, Whedon performs minor miracles keeping all the balls in the air and making us feel a personal connection to these costumed superBFFs. If I had to guess, I'd say the film is about 35 percent clever quips/character development and 65 percent giant metal things smashing into each other. I would've preferred that ratio flipped, but then again, I'm not the film's target audience. On the other hand, I do love a kitty stacked on top of a puppy.