A near perfect mixture of action, drama, comedy, and character development, The Avengers: Age of Ultron manages the seemingly impossible by trumping the original in every respect.

When a shaken Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) uses Loki’s newly recovered scepter to finally activate his Ultron AI program, something goes terribly wrong and the AI (James Spader) decides that it needs to wipe the Avengers out in order to protect the Earth. Things get worse when Ultron enlists the aide of a pair of Hydra enhanced twins who have a grudge against Stark. Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and Pietro (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) Maximoff bring some extra danger to the table as Wanda can mess with people’s minds in addition to telekinesis while Pietro is a speedster who moves incredibly fast. Finding themselves at a distinct disadvantage, the Avengers have to overcome their differences and their own perceived short comings to save the world from this emerging menace.

 

So right off the bat, it is really hard to talk too much about the things that go on in this movie without spoiling various twists and turns in the process. So I have to talk in generalities a bit more than normal. The bottom line, however, is that the Age of Ultron fires on all cylinders and only a writer/director of Joss Whedon’s caliber could have made all this work. There is a lot going on and a lot of characters to service and Whedon keeps all these balls in the air with deft skill and confidence.

The writing is exceptional here as Whedon manages to up the ante from the first film while still making it feel personal and not get so lost in action and spectacle that the audience doesn’t care who these people are and why they are doing what they are doing. The focus shifts around a bit as far as which characters are highlighted with extra attention being given to Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, who got the short shrift in the last movie by virtue of the fact that he was mind controlled the whole time. Extra backstory and motivation is given to Hawkeye and it makes him feel like a much more valuable team member this time out.

That isn’t to say that the other characters are not given anything to do. Everyone gets their moments with deepening relationships between everyone at different times and those relationships are complex enough to slide along the spectrum from friend to enemy and back again. There is even some romance here for good measure although just like the rest of the relationships in this film, nothing is tidy or easy. At the end of it all, however, all of the main characters of the movie are given arcs and while some are bigger than others, everyone gets the right amount of attention for the story being told.

The action is bigger than the first film by a metric ton and the addition of new power sets and strategies allow for this action to become increasingly more creative. As the Avengers get more and more used to working together they gel more as a team and that leads to some pretty awesome group maneuvers in which they combine their powers and abilities to greater effect.

The effects here generally back the action up very well. The opening action scene, an assault on the Hydra base holding both the scepter and the twins, has a couple of effects hiccups that had me a bit worried for a second but from there on out everything looks great and the CGI looks pretty fantastic. The new powers are conveyed very well, particularly some of the effects surrounding Wanda as her inherent creepiness when she first shows up plays up to her Scarlett Witch moniker (which is never used in the film). Pietro’s (Quicksilver) speed effects are solid and never really overdo it with slow motion or blur effects. After the character’s appearance in X-Men: Days of Future Past (played by Evan Peters) there was a lot of speculation about how well the Quicksilver would be pulled off here and I think that the two takes on the character were so different that they are hard to compare. He doesn’t do anything as objectively cool as the ‘Time in a Bottle’ scene in X-Men but he is definitely a more fully realized character and feels pretty accurate to his general attitude in the comics.

Given that the main villain is a killer AI that takes residence in a giant metal body, the effects for Ultron were pretty important and this is where the effects really shined. Ultron never feels like he is a CGI addition or that he isn’t taking up physical space. Each iteration of his body looks better and better and there is never a moment that he feels less than real.

A large part of why Ultron works so well is that James Spader is absolutely perfect in the role. His voice is right on and he uses it to command every scene he is in. He manages to infuse Ultron with a distinct personality and give him mood and attitude such that you stop thinking of it as a computer program but a real being with real thoughts and feelings. The character is very much the teenager who has just discovered Philosophy for the first time and thinks he knows everything and this makes for a really unique and different take on the villain role and gives the MCU a much needed boost in terms of villains.

The other performances in the movie are all top notch which is no surprise from a cast we have seen be awesome in their other films. The tension between Stark and Captain America (Chris Evans) feels real and very earned given what each character has been through. The same goes for the burgeoning relationship between Bruce Banner(Mark Ruffalo) and Natasha Romanov(Scarlett Johannson) as they come to it honestly and the conflict that they experience is deeply personal and earned. Chris Hemsworth had some of Thor’s story cut down but he is still very effective here as he balances Thor’s natural arrogance with the deep fear that he will fail and hurt the ones he loves. Olsen and Taylor-Johnson are both great as Wanda and Pietro and manage to make the audience care in a relatively short amount of time.

These performances go a long way in solidifying the best moments in the movie which are the scenes in which the team is just hanging around talking or debating. The chemistry of the cast and the excellent dialogue here really shines and frankly I could watch two hours of just that. As it is we get a perfect ratio of these character moments and action set pieces and when it was all over I was not ready for it to end.

If there is a flaw with the movie I suppose it would have to be that it is not a movie in which you could really understand it if you hadn’t seen any of the previous films. Sure there is material that is worth seeing for sure but without the context and the buildup it would be pretty rough to follow. That is really not that much of a flaw though because at this point you shouldn’t really expect to jump into the 11^th installment of a franchise and expect to know everything.

Conclusion [10 out of 10]

If you are a Marvel Cinematic Universe fan I would be very surprised if you didn’t dig this one. Well, that isn’t true, comics fans are notorious contrarians so I wouldn’t be that surprised in the same way that it is not a huge surprise for some people to either not pay attention to dialogue or misread context and jump to conclusions about what particular characters might mean in certain situations. For me, Age of Ultron was a perfect sequel to what is arguably the best comic book movie ever made. It builds upon everything that has come before it and masterfully weaves all of it together in a tidy package that sets the stage for what comes next without feeling inconsequential itself. It is exciting, funny and emotionally resonant and it is a fitting swan song for Joss Whedon. I saw it two times in as many days and I want to see it more. I highly recommend it.