“Avengers” Big, Bombastic and Very Funny
By Skip Sheffield
It’s big, it’s busy, it’s bombastic and it doesn’t make a
lick of sense, but “Marvel’s The Avengers: Age of Ultron” is wryly funny,
eye-poppingly visual and always entertaining. Most of the characters from the
2012 launch are back, as well as director Josh Whedon, who goes back to Stan
Lee’s original 1963 comic for his script.
Marvel fanboys treat the original comics like the Holy Grail.
Not me. I never read them as a kid and I don’t much care now. But that doesn’t
mean I can’t appreciate the creativity and pure entertainment value of these
big-screen adventures. As in the first one, “Avengers” remains anchored by
Robert Downey, Jr.’s fabulously rich, devastatingly deadpan-witty inventor Tony Stark,
who hops into his self-designed, almost invulnerable Iron Man suit of armor in
times of trouble.
Trouble is afoot once again as Stark and his cohorts Chris
Hemsworth/Thor; Mark Ruffalo/Bruce Banner/The Hulk; Steve Rogers/Captain America, Scarlett
Johansson/Natasha Romanoff and Jeremy Renner/Hawkeye get word that some
sinister character named Baron von Strucker has created a new force called
Ultron (voiced by James Spader), bent on nothing less than the extinction of
the human race.
The Marvel gang’ s “dirty half-dozen” members of
S.H.I.E.L.D. had gone dormant after the first adventure, but now Tony Stark
feels it is time to reactivate the team to save the world.
So yeah, this is another save-the-world story, but Whedon’s
tech crew has lavished attention to visual details, beautifully blending live
action with computer-generated images. This is especially effective in the
transformation of mild-mannered Bruce Banner (Ruffalo) into The Hulk. A new
plot element is the budding romance between Scarlett Johansson’s husky-voiced
Natasha and Bruce Banner and his huge, mute alter ego whom Natasha calls “big
guy.” Jeremy Renner gets more screen time as the hilariously self-deprecating
Hawkeye, who laments all he has is a bow and arrow to fight the forces of evil.
Chris Hemsworth is gently ribbed for his gorgeousness as Thor, and we learn
just how heavy that hammer is.
Two new characters are “The Twins:” Pietro Maximoff, aka
Quicksilver (Aaron-Taylor Johnson) and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), aka
Scarlett Witch. Another potential good guy is the red robot Vision (voiced by Paul
Bettany, who did bad guy Loki in the first one). When S.H.I.E.L.D. Captain Nick
Fury (Samuel A. Jackson) reappears to take the situation in hand, all the good
guys enter in an uneasy alliance and you just know there will be a battle
royale.
I have read there are already two more segments planned in
this never-ending story, but Josh Whedon has sworn this is his last. So for
now, “Avengers: Age of Ultron” is the high water mark of an epic cinematic
fantasy.
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