I guess I’ve held out long enough from helping the Marvel machine shake ten bucks from your pocket. Welp, no surprise that this sequel is worse than the original, but the original was one of the most overrated movies of the last few years, so let’s not get too disappointed.
What Works: Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark continues to make enjoyably offbeat jokes that break up the slam-bang-whish-boom non-sense. Jeremy Renner acquits himself nicely in what is a thankless role (the team even makes subtle jokes about how unnecessary Hawkeye is), reminding you that he should be a bigger star if he wasn’t forced to play third-banana in massive franchise movies (Mission Impossible) or garbage like Hansel and Gretel. And the movie’s best asset is the voice of its villain: James Spader, who is never on-screen, and that’s a pity because just his sarcastic line readings as a robot have more personality than two-thirds of the human cast. In fact, the quiet scene between him and Paul Bettany’s “good” android is my favorite in the film. It’s all the things the rest of the movie isn’t: interesting, ideas-driven, true to the characters, and ultimately satisfying.
What Doesn’t: This movie is so overstuffed, Don Cheadle’s Iron Man sidekick (I think he’s called…Iron Patriot? War Machine? Shameless Marvel tie-in?) is given nearly as much to do as Thor. Why is Thor even in this movie? That’s how little his involvement matters. The whole thing feels like a series of corporate synergy exercises disguised as a movie, that’s why Captain America’s old flame Agent Carter shows up for an unnecessary cameo (to remind us of ABC’s “Agent Carter”) and there’s a throwaway stretch of the movie set in Wakanda that’s barely related to the rest of the movie (all to set up the upcoming Black Panther film).
Even the end of the movie feels like a set-up for a second string Avengers. We are not even all the way through only the second movie of the franchise before Marvel is so desperate for our dollars that they’re setting up a spin-off franchise of back benchers. How can an individual movie be worth a damn when it’s just existing as a launching pad or cohesive glue for ten other franchises?
So what about what’s left of the movie after all the time setting up the other movies? The metal-on-metal heavy action scenes feel like B-stock footage from the last Transformers film, and eventually started to blur together. The “character development” is non-existent and not even on par with the first film: the original Avengers had Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk eventually coming to terms with himself, but this one’s main arc is based on Downey’s Iron Man supposedly growing from his ego in creating a world-saving robot by…creating another world saving robot? It could have been fascinating to see James Spader’s Ultron as the dark side of Downey’s narcissistic idealism, and have that taunt him, but Tony Stark is a stubbornly non-introspective character who has barely changed an inch from when we first met him.
And I’m a little surprised that the Politically Correct Police—who have been so thorough in talking about Marvel’s sorry female characters—haven’t noticed that both Avengers films have had such…effeminate villains. Both Tom Hiddleson’s Loki and Ultron play on the snarky, elitist, “sissified” intellectual villain that has always played the foil to the more brute-force, macho heroes.
What I Would Have Done Differently: I think you can make great superhero films (the Dark Knight films, Watchmen, and even the first Iron Man), but I don’t think Marvel has any interest in making them. I know it’s naive to think that a studio should put creativity on par with profits, but the fact that they now seem like enemies in the Marvel world just shows how bad the problem has gotten. You can make money, and a good movie, but not if you’re more concerned with creating new products inside the one people have currently paid to watch. That almost guarantees that people aren’t going to get a satisfying standalone experience.
In a world where TV shows are getting more like movies with standalone seasons and rotating casts, then why would anyone go to a movie to watch what is–essentially–an episode of a procedural show where nothing really changes from installment to installment?