Avengers: Age of Ultron Review

You can hear the studio in this film. Whole sequences exist only to set up other pictures, a cave vision in Norway, a farmhouse detour, a bath under a South African waterfall, and the seams show badly enough that the director left the franchise afterward. What survives is considerable. James Spader gives Ultron a peculiar petulant intelligence, a machine that has read the entire internet and come away with a grudge and a sense of humor, and his best scenes are conversational rather than destructive.

The party at Avengers Tower, everyone trying to lift the hammer and failing precisely in character, is the best ensemble scene in the series. Paul Bettany's Vision arrives late and immediately raises the ceiling. Elizabeth Olsen is doing more than the script gives her. Against all that, the Hulk and Iron Man brawl through Johannesburg is destruction without stakes, the Black Widow romance is asserted rather than written, and the Sokovia climax is another swarm of identical robots over a rising rock. It is a busy, tired, occasionally brilliant film about how hard these films had become to make.