Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

There's a moment early in Age of Ultron where everything clicks. The Avengers are raiding a Hydra base, the camera sweeps across the whole team working in perfect coordination, and you think: right, this is going to be good. And then, slowly, steadily, the film spends the next two hours talking you out of that feeling.

I wanted to like this more than I did. I genuinely did. The Avengers (2012) pulled off something that felt genuinely difficult: it made a sprawling ensemble superhero film feel tight, fun, and alive. This one wants to be bigger, darker, more complicated. What it ends up being is messier and considerably less satisfying.

There are things that work, and I want to be fair about that. The opening raid is tightly choreographed and sets a cracking pace. The party scene at Avengers tower is probably the best thing in the film, all sharp banter and quiet character tension, the kind of writing Joss Whedon does well when he's not being pulled in seventeen directions at once. And James Spader's voice performance as Ultron is genuinely compelling. He plays the rogue AI with this brilliant mix of sarcasm and wounded grandiosity, like a philosophy student who's read too much Nietzsche and decided to level a continent. The concept is strong. A villain born from Tony Stark's own ego, convinced he's saving humanity by destroying it. That's rich material.

The problem is the film never commits to it. The tone lurches constantly. One minute we're facing the extinction of the human race, the next someone's cracking wise, and then we're in a barn in rural America for an extended detour that grinds everything to a halt. None of it flows. The romance between Black Widow and Bruce Banner is the most obvious casualty. It feels like it was conceived in a pitch meeting and nobody stopped to ask whether the actual script would make it work. It doesn't. There's no chemistry, no emotional logic to it, just a lot of scenes where two characters tell us they have feelings rather than showing us anything that makes us believe it.

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver are brought in with real potential. The mind-bending sequences where Wanda gets inside the Avengers' heads are among the film's most interesting ideas. But their arcs get swamped. They're reduced to trauma shorthand and then either sidelined or rushed to a conclusion that doesn't land the way it should, because we haven't been given enough time with either of them.

By the time the third act arrives, with its floating city and its endless waves of CGI drones and its apocalyptic backdrop that somehow manages to feel low-stakes, I'd well and truly lost the thread. It's the same problem Avengers: Infinity War (2018) largely avoided: when everything is enormous, nothing feels dangerous. When every scene is frantic, you stop feeling the urgency. The scale here isn't earned because the emotional groundwork hasn't been laid carefully enough to make us feel like anything real is at risk.

Whedon clearly still has a feel for group dynamics, and the film is polished enough to watch without actively suffering. But polished isn't the same as good, and busy isn't the same as engaging. The script is overstuffed, the pacing all over the place, and for all its apocalyptic noise, the film ends without leaving much of a mark. Characters are introduced, arcs are gestured at, and then everything resets ready for the next instalment. It mistakes motion for momentum, and there's quite a difference between the two.

Two stars. A decent enough watch in the moment if you're already invested in the universe, but there's very little here that lingers once the credits roll. It's not a disaster so much as a bloated, forgettable middle chapter. The Marvel machine kept turning. This one just turned without going anywhere particularly interesting.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2015  | Watched: 2025-07-31

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Sky Store
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus · Philo · Starz Amazon Channel · Starz
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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