For Reel

Director: Joss Whedon

When The Avengers of the title are putting a collective beatdown on an army of robots, Age of Ultron does enough to satisfy those obligated movie-goers whom the Marvel franchise has trained to think, “What’s next?” Director Joss Whedon demonstrates that there are still a handful of neat ways to throw a shield or to make a knowing, snarky comment about the nature of the genre (Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye shouts, “The city is flying! We’re fighting an army of robots! And I have a bow and arrow! None of this makes sense!)”, but where the film fails is in making a convincing argument that these are heroes worth following in installment after installment. It’s an admirable choice to take a reprieve from the spectacle to put the characters together in a country house (an increasingly common locale in action blockbusters), but rather than enriching the characters and their relationships the tangent only serves to illustrate how dull they all are. That said, one buys a ticket to a Marvel movie for the action sequences and the sense of humor, and on those grounds it is hard to consider this a failure.