TORONTO — Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron has already grossed more than a quarter-of-a-billion dollars at the box office in countries where it opened in April. Now, the sequel to 2012’s The Avengers (which earned more than $1.5 billion) is in theatres in the U.S. and Canada.
Joss Whedon returns as director and an all-star cast is back as iconic Marvel characters like Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Captain America and Black Widow — and Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen are onboard as Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch respectively.
James Spader provides the voice of Ultron.
Avengers: Age of Ultron is a blockbuster. But is it any good? Here’s a look at some of the reviews.
“In Avengers: Age of Ultron … there is definitely plenty ado-ing. Too much, in fact – but then we come to watch the Avengers films, at least in part, for their clown-car excess of superheroes,” opined Jake Coyle of The Associated Press.
“The film’s hefty machinery – the action sequences, the sequel baiting – suck up much of the movie’s oxygen, and the mammoth action scenes have a habit of crushing the smaller moments.”
READ MORE: What the critics are saying about other movies
At the San Jose Mercury News, Tony Hicks agrees.
“Avengers: Age of Ultron could’ve been called Avengers: It’s Complicated,” he wrote.
“Wow, there’s a lot going on in this movie.”
Hicks admitted the movie is “visually stunning” and that he enjoyed the “character dynamics.” It’s also a good lead-in, he said, to the Avengers: Infinity War chapters due in 2018 and 2019.
“With all the subplots and unexplainable events in Ultron, it could’ve been a real mess (come to think of it, it was),” wrote Hicks. “But lovable characters, just the right amount of humour and spectacular action make Ultron a worthy bridge to whatever happens next in The Avengers’ universe.”
Peter Howell of the Toronto Star declared “confusion reigns, along with a lot of noisy fun.”
He added: “If it sometimes feels a bit less fun than the first film, which had the novelty of teaming Marvel superheroes after years of separate adventures, it certainly is no less noisy.”
Ultron has plenty of “CGI-laden action scenes where you can barely tell the people from the pixels,” Howell said.
At Polygon, Arthur Gies said the movie is accessible to fans and newcomers alike.
“It doesn’t spend a lot of time re-familiarizing you with the characters that live and work here, instead getting right down to the story at hand,” he wrote. “Casual interaction between characters reminds you who these people are, and, for newcomers, sketches out just enough about their personalities and histories to keep up.”
Gies called it a shame that Ultron seems “relegated to a background plot thread.”
He also complained that Whedon’s “sense of comedic timing sometimes stumbles.”
Gies wrote: “His expected jokes and gags are well-represented in Age of Ultron from the first five minutes of the movie onward. Several got a chuckle out of me, but there were a few really leaden shots that were more distracting than anything, one of which particularly scraped at my affection for Tony — generally one of the more likable characters in the universe.”
Forbes reviewer Scott Mendelson called the plot of Ultron “shockingly inconsequential.”
He opined: “It hits all the marks, providing big-scale action and the required witty banter, but there is an air of artifice and irrelevance to the whole affair.
“The whole thing, without revealing what does or does not occur, feels like a would-be darker, more emotionally draining sequel that feels sapped of its trauma and impact, and thus sapped of its relevance to the ongoing story it is telling.”
Mendelson said that, with the exception, of Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye, “none of the main actors … seem happy to be there.”
He decided it “is not an aggressively bad film by any means, but it also doesn’t go out of its way to be aggressively good. It lacks any impact in the overall arc and isn’t all that entertaining on its own merits.”
David Edelstein of Vulture said he didn’t have a clue what was going on in the opening action scenes.
“As both storytelling and storyboarding, the sequence is a disgrace,” he said, calling the movie “a mess by all conventional narrative standards.”
In the New York Post, Kyle Smith described Whedon’s writing and directing as mediocre.
“Not that the film is a disaster. It has enough whammo-kerblammo, high-stakes standoffs and breezy banter that, if you work really hard to fool yourself, you might mistake it for a pleasing blockbuster,” he wrote.
“Scriptwise, it’s all very tame and small, very jokey and cute, very Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
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