MOVIE REVIEW - Avengers: The Age Of Ultron

Here comes the next Avengers movie, The Age Of Ultron checking in at 141 minutes so you better budget some time to get through this one.

Hard to honestly review these kind of flicks.  Movie goers already like every single frame of these kind of movies before ever seeing one of them.  But as much as I would like to get on the bandwagon and say how great this is, I simply cannot. Oh, there is much to admire and like here, but there are serious problems here as well.

Our story is basically this. The Avengers lead basically by Tony Stark (Ironman) (Robert Downey Jr.) are still fighting to keep the world safe.  He then attempts to harness the power of Artificial Intelligence for the sake of good, but it goes horribly wrong.  The Ultron program takes on a life of its own, and now is the biggest threat to the Avengers, and wants to have global extinction of the human race.  Ultron (James Spader) is very powerful, and seems to have the upper hand as the Avengers are divided and seemingly helpless to stop him.

So in addition to half of Hollywood fighting to screen time, and all sitting in the back seat still to Downey Jr., we have to have endless animated and long robot battle scenes for everyone to admire.  They try to continually develop these superhero characters, but it's tough as there are simply too many to pay attention to.  This really looks more and more like a video game, and I understand that is a whole lot of the allure here.  But overall this is fatiguing and just more of the same.  They are really reliant too on wise cracking humor and inside jokes that give this a sense of levity that it needs, but that too has run it's course.

Of course, this is going to haul in truckloads of money, and there is no doubt this has a gigantic appeal for many.  But this movie lacks heart. This lacks any depth in total.  This is just the same characters reprising their same roles, and really bringing nothing at all new to the table.  You would be hard pressed to distinguish the scenes from the the first Avengers to this one.  This is also entirely too long as the editing blade should have been sharper and more skillfully done. But in its defense there is room for mindless summer fun. And this is certainly mindless.

Huge kudos though to James Spader.   He is the voice of Ultron and is superb in every way possible. The dialogue written for him was sensational and he delivers is brilliantly.  They do take time to really develop Ultron, and Spader brings it to life in a most magnificent way. There is no doubt, that Spader's performance and none of it on camera is the best thing in this movie. His work lately in his career has been splendid. 

Avengers: The Age Of Ultron.  Going to be the hit of the summer, just not the best movie of the summer./