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Fantastic 4 /F4: Rise of the Silver Surfer

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Fantastic 4 Trailer – 2005

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer – 2007

Director: Tim Story

Run Time: Fantastic 4: 106 Minutes, Rise of the Silver Surfer: 92 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Cast:
Ioan Gruffudd: Mr. Fantastic/Reed Richards
Chris Evans: Johnny Storm/The Human Torch
Jessica Alba: Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman
Michael Chiklis: Ben Grimm/The Thing
Julian McMahon: Victor Von Doom/Dr. Doom
Kerry Washington: Alicia Masters
Andre Brauer: General Hager
Doug Jones: The Silver Surfer
Laurence Fishburne: The Silver Surfer(voice)

During the first decade of the new century, we saw a lot of movies based on comic books by Marvel and DC Comics.  One of the first movies that really kick-started a new craze for comic book movies was X-Men.  It proved again, that when you have film-makers that actually care about a film franchise, they can create something amazing.  Spider-Man would show up two years later and take the world by storm.  So, we’ve got a few successful films that showed that comic book movies can be a viable genre in film.  Unfortunately, we’ve also seen some not-so-good films like Daredevil and Ghost Rider.  One of the franchises that Marvel wanted on the big screen was another of its flagship superhero stories:  The Fantastic 4.  Featuring a unique cast of characters like the super-intelligent Reed Richards, the beautiful Sue Storm, the hot-headed Johnny Storm, and tough guy Ben Grimm, it was essentially a family of superheroes.  The Fantastic 4 comics also gave us one of the most unique and iconic villains ever: Dr. Doom.  Doom has inspired many villains including Darth Vader.  I figured since Fox is releasing a brand new film based on the Fantastic 4, I would re-visit Fox’s previous attempts.  I’m going to be reviewing both of them together, so this may be a little long-winded.

The first film opens as Reed Richards and Ben Grimm visit Victor Von Doom to get financed for their mission to space.  Why?  They’ve discovered that a cloud of something-something may have evolved life on earth, and another cloud of the same something-something is on its way.  So, they make their way on to one of Doom’s space stations with Sue and Johnny Storm in tow.  Instead of having 7 hours before the cloud arrives, Reed discovers that they only have minutes, so he tries to warn Doom to close the shutters so they can be protected.  Doesn’t work and the cloud slams into the station hitting each member with a massive dose of interstellar radiation.  They wake up on Earth to find that they have developed unique powers.  Reed Richards can stretch like rubber, Sue can be invisible and generate force fields.  Johnny can generate and control fire.  Ben Grimm gets the worst of it physically as he’s transformed into a gigantic….Thing with superhuman strength.  Doom himself ends up getting his body reinforced with super strong metal and can absorb electrical power.  Reed Richards tries to find a way to make them all normal again when Doom goes insane.  Story-wise, this is an origin story, and it’s not actually half-bad.   We get introduced to interesting characters with unique personalities.  One of the things that drives this movie are the relationships between the characters.  The situations can be pretty amusing.  But that’s also the problem:  Somebody somewhere decided that it would be a good idea to make the Fantastic 4 into a sit-com of sorts.  Yeah, the family dynamics generate some laughs, but the whole movie seems centered around that instead of dealing with the real threat: Doom.  The fact is is that we really don’t get a whole lot of background into these characters and where come from, especially Dr. Doom.

The acting is okay for the most part, and everybody seems to well-cast.  Ioan Gruffudd is well-cast as the awkward yet, intelligent Reed Richards.  Michael Chiklis is fantastic(ha,ha!)as Ben.  Chris Evans almost steals the show.  Given that Evans would later become Captain America, it’s awesome to see him play The Human Torch.  The only exception here is Julian McMahon as Doom.  I just don’t buy Julian as the villain.  He comes across as a mustache-twirling dingbat.  The character doesn’t even get the iconic suit until towards the end of the movie, and even then it’s just the mask and the hood, not the armor.  Some of the action in the movie, while spectacular, seems strangely accidental.  There’s a scene on a bridge where we see Ben Grimm trying to keep a guy from committing suicide, and ends up causing a MASSIVE traffic accident.  It’s fun to watch, but it really seems put in there just to showcase what these guys can do.  After the whole ordeal, everybody’s cheering the four “superheroes.”  It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  Then we start seeing Doom start to lose it when he discovers that his board of directors have turned their backs on him and he feels betrayed by Richards.  It isn’t until the last 20 minutes of the film that it starts to feel like a superhero movie.  You finally have the four go up against Doom in a fairly awesome spectacle.  Tim Story isn’t an action director and it shows, even though he does his best.

Rise of the Silver Surfer doesn’t fare much better.  After Doom has been defeated, Reed and Sue are gearing up to get married when they get a visit from General Hager, who’s team discovered an unusual object that may have been the catalyst for some of the strange weather patterns that have circled the globe.  They discover that this being is an alien who is silver and rides a surfboard earning him the name, Silver Surfer.  It turns out that when this guy shows, eight days later, the planet dies.  Why?  Because of who the Surfer serves: Galactus.  The Sufer was introduced in a Fantastic 4comic series, so it makes sense that he would show in a F4 movie.  Here’s the problem:  Everything here is strung together by a weak string of coincidences.  Even Doom himself comes back because of the energy that the Surfer emits.  Silver Surfer is a little better than the previous movie in that it doesn’t waste time introducing the main characters.  We know who they are, so we can expect some shenanigans.  The whole sit-com aspect of the film seems to have been scaled back, and it works.  While the first movie felt more like a sit-com, Silver Surfer feels more like a proper superhero movie.  Oh, make no mistake, it’s still got some pretty silly stuff, such as when Johnny encounters the Surfer and his molecules are screwed up in such a way that he can switch powers with the others.  This does make for some amusing situations.

The casting still works, but they still brought Julian McMahon in as Dr. Doom.  I don’t get it, he’s not threatening enough, and last I checked Doom wasn’t able to manipulate electricity like Electro.  He’s still the mustache-twirling dingbat that he was the first time around, and they still have him unmasked.  WHY?!  Part of why Doom was such an iconic character was because of his outfit.  It was very intimidating and very practical.  There’s a lot more action this time around, and it seems to have improved.  Bigger explosions, decent visual effects, and the Surfer himself is spectacular.  They got him right.  Laurence Fishburne lends his voice to the character giving him a more powerful presence.  He actually gets a pretty decent amount of screen time.  There’s a problem, though: When you introduce the Silver Surfer, you’ve got to bring in the other guy:  Galactus.  When I first heard that they were making Rise of the Silver Surfer, I was excited to see if they did Galactus properly.  They didn’t.  They done f**ked it up.  Instead of the enormous humanoid creature from the beginning of time, we get a giant…..cloud.  Yep, a giant cloud of mass destruction.  That has to be one of the most embarrassing decisions by a film studio.  It pissed everyone off, myself included.  I don’t consider myself a reader of those particular comics, but I do know that Galactus was NOT a cloud.  Also, there’s the subplot of Dr. Doom trying to take control of the Surfer’s board, granting him ultimate power.  You would think that with the end of the world merely hours away that he would use that power to help end the threat.  Nope.  Dr. Doom is selfish and completely single-minded.

So, yeah, these movies definitely have issues, but you know what, they’re not horrible movies.  What Silver Surfer did with Galactus is pretty unforgivable, but I still had fun with it.  I think Tim Story’s heart was in the right place, but he just wasn’t the right guy to do these movies.  You need a director that has experience doing action, and Tim Story doesn’t have that experience.  The writing is pretty awful too, despite some pretty funny scenes.  While I definitely think these movies are disappointing, I had a much better time with the Fantastic 4 movies than I did with Avengers: Age of Ultron.  Yes, you read that right.  They didn’t really overstay their welcome.  Age of Ultron did.  That was a movie that ran out of steam half-way through.  I’m not prepared to call these movie good, but they aren’t that bad either.  The first film gets a 7/10, and Silver Surfer gets a 7.5/10.  Unfortunately, the movies didn’t do well enough to justify a stand-alone Silver Surfer film.  That project is currently in development hell, and with the reboot of Fantastic 4 on the way, Silver Surfer’s future remains in doubt.

 

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Disappointing Marvel/DC Movies

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Movies based on comic books are nothing new.  They’ve been around for decades, but it was Superman: The Movie that really made audiences take movies like that seriously.  Batman, while it did have it’s cheesy films back in the day, got its first real serious film in Tim Burton’s 1989 film.  Comic book movies were starting to be taken seriously.  Batman Returns was a sequel that in some ways ended up being better than the first.  But, while we did see some good movies like Superman and Batman, we also ended up with some pretty terrible follow-ups.  Back in 2000, we began to see a major explosion of movies based on comic books.  X-Men was the movie that really ushered in a new age of comic book film.  We didn’t just start getting movies from Marvel’s line-up, but DC Comics as well.  The first film out of DC/Warner was Batman Begins.  But for all the good ones that we get like The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and The Dark Knight, we get crap like Superman 3/4, Jonah Hex, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.  For today’s list, I’m going through each comic book film that I personally found disappointing.  If my opinions match other people’s opinions, that is entirely coincidental.  Anyway, as I like to say, let’s get this show on the road.

Ghost Rider/Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance

First out of the gate are the two Ghost Rider films starring Nicolas Cage.  Where do I start with these?  First, let’s start with the fact that Cage is terribly miscast as Johnny Blaze.  He has a horrendous Southern accent and he eats jelly beans out of a martini glass.  Are you kidding me?!  Blaze is a full-on alcoholic in the comics.  Nicolas Cage said that he’s a huge fan of the comic book, so why was the character so butchered?  Cage was too old for the role, and even more so for it’s sequel/reboot.  The casting in the first movie was a mixed bag.  Yeah, you had the likes of Sam Elliott, Nic Cage, and Peter Fonda.  But you also had Eva Mendez, Wes Bentley and everbody else.  Yeah, the trailers made the film look interesting, but it was anything but interesting.  They got the character of Blackheart all wrong.  In the comics, Blackheart rarely took on human form, because he’s a demon.  He didn’t need to.  The character was abominably written and horribly acted by Wes Bentley.  Blackheart was supposed to be this demonic bad-ass, and what do we get?  A pasty-faced hum-drum villain.  Yeah, the visual effects are pretty spectacular, and when Blaze turns into the Rider, Cage goes full-on crazy.  I’m not suggesting that we really take a biker with a burning skull too seriously, but we could certainly do better than this.  So, we get Ghost Rider: Spirit Of Vengeance, also starring Nicolas Cage.  I thought this one was a lot better, but that’s not really hard to do.  It was supposed to be a reboot.  When you do a reboot, you need to recast the main character, and they didn’t.  I like Cage, I really do.  He’s a fantastic actor, but he has no business being Johnny Blaze.  The cast is a bit more interesting as we get Idris Elba as a French mercenary and Christopher Lambert as the head of an ancient society of monks.  But that doesn’t help the fact that is not a good movie.  Neither one is.  Mark Steven Johnson, who directed the first Ghost Rider, also wrote it.  He’s pretty much dropped off the radar after Ghost Rider was released.  Speaking of Mark Steven Johnson, he also wrote and directed the next movie:

Daredevil

I’m really split on this one.  Daredevil was released back in 2003 and it got slammed left and right by critics, and rightly so.  It was not a good movie.  The character of Daredevil isn’t exactly on the level of say, Spider-Man, but he had a pretty decent following.  Ben Affleck starred in the lead role, and to be perfectly honest, I thought he did a great job.  I also thought that Michael Clarke Duncan did a great job as Kingpin.  So, what went wrong?  Everything else.  The tone of the film was absolutely inconsistent with the character.  It was too reminiscent of Batman.  It was dark, brooding and bleak.  The writing was terrible and the story was atrocious.  Some of the fight scenes were a total joke, like the playground fight scene between Matt Murdoch and Elektra.  Daredevil wound up getting a director’s cut, which really improved the film in many ways.  But it was too little, too late.  After Daredevil was released, Affleck said he would never do another comic book movie again and the film franchise was as dead as a door nail.  Recently, it looks like Ben Affleck is getting another chance to play a superhero again.  He will be playing Batman in the upcoming Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice which is set to be released next year.  I think he can do it.  Daredevil is also getting a new lease on life as a TV show on Netflix.  Apparently, it’s been getting really good reviews.  But the Ben Affleck film of Daredevil was a total mess, there’s no getting around it.

Spider-Man 3

Now, here is what a train-wreck looks like.  It’s a shame too, because the first two Spider-Man films that Sam Raimi did were fantastic.  So, why did Spider-Man 3 not live up to the hype?  A lot of elements went wrong here.  One, too many super-villains.  We had Sandman, New Green Goblin and Venom.  Venom was more a fan-service, and the way he was treated was a disaster.  Topher Grace was hilariously miscast as Eddie Brock.  Brock was supposed to be a bit of a jock, you know, big and muscular.  Topher Grace is not that.  Peter Parker going emo was also funny, for all the wrong reasons.  I don’t know if it was Raimi’s idea or Marvel’s, but they had dance numbers in Spider-Man 3.  There were a few things that the film got right: Thomas Haden Church as Sandman was not only a fantastic character, but was also very sympathetic.  He did the wrong things for the right reasons, and that made him more human than anyone else in the movie.  The action’s great, but it doesn’t mean a thing if everything else is a complete wreck.  As a result, Sony Pictures ended up rebooting the franchise not even 10 years after Spider-Man 3 was released.  Not once, but TWICE.  Yes, the franchise got rebooted twice after the box-office failure of The Amazing Spider-Man 2.  Rami’s third film had a lot of potential.  It’s just too bad that the writers and director had to throw in everything but the kitchen sink.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

This one is the most recent of the bunch, and quite possibly the most painful for me to put on this list.  I really wanted to love this movie.  I really did.  It gets a lot of elements right.  The action is superb, the humor is spot on and the jokes fly at a mile-a-minute.  But it also gets a lot wrong.  For one, the jokes fly at a mile-a-minute.  That’s rather inappropriate for situations in a movie that have real consequences.  I’m not asking for Dark Knight levels of grit and drama, but you really need to cut back on the funny stuff when you’re dealing with an end-of-world situation inadvertently started by Tony Stark.  Let us not forget the terrible romantic angle between Black Widow and Bruce Banner.  Those two have absolutely ZERO chemistry between them and to put those two together doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense.  Ultron, while voiced brilliantly by James Spader, is a one-note villain.  It’s also a villain we’ve seen before in movies like Terminator and The Matrix.  The whole man vs. machine deal, as I’ve stated in my review, is not what a follow-up movie should deal with.  The movie is a major success already, so, I’m not worried about the future of The Avengers film franchise, but Age of Ultron feels like a major step backwards in my opinion.  I didn’t hate, I rather enjoyed, but it was very underwhelming for me.  This one was disappointing.

The Green Lantern

Oh, boy.  There are movies that are outright disasters, and then there’s The Green Lantern.  Let’s start with the obvious: The suit.  Good lord, what were they thinking making the whole thing CGI?  It just doesn’t work.  I mean it works in situations where CGI is required.  But having it as a constant, just doesn’t work.  What’s worse, is we knew this was going to happen.  Somebody had the bright idea that an actual suit would seem too impractical.  Well, I’ve got news: The CGI suit is impractical and it’s absolutely ridiculous to look at.  The casting is also very suspect.  Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan?  No.  Just….no.  I like Reynolds, I really do.  But I think he would make a better Deadpool than a Green Lantern.  Peter Sarsgaard as Hector Hammond?  That was not a particularly good choice.  Mark Strong was fine as Sinestro.  Here’s the problem, though: Sinestro is Green Lantern’s arch-enemy.  But they made a giant yellow cloud the main villain of the film.  It’s a visually spectacular film and did some things properly, but the writing and the story are just monumentally stupid.  It’s unlikely we’re going to see another Green Lantern film until after Batman V. Superman hits the screen next year.  The character deserves a better movie.  Speaking of evil clouds of destruction:

Fantastic 4/Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer

The Fantastic Four films are probably among the most disappointing movies ever made, in my opinion.  Let’s start with the first film:  The cast was mostly good, with Ioan Gruffudd as Reed Richards.  I thought he was pretty good in the role.  He was a little awkard, but still pretty cool.  Michael Chiklis was phenomenal as Ben Grimm.  But the one I really liked was Chris Evans as Johnny Storm.  He had the attitude and the humor which really gave the character some real heart.  Jessica Alba was miscast as Sue Storm.  Alba just doesn’t have the acting chops to really portray a character like that.  Julian McMahon was an absolute joke as Dr. Doom.  They could not have picked a person more wrong to play that character.  He doesn’t even get the whole outfit towards the end of the first movie.  Doom is an iconic super-villain and Tim Story screwed it up.  Not to mention they turned the whole movie into a comedy.  That was Story’s intention, and it failed miserably.  The Fantastic Four are some of the most well-known superheroes in comic book history, and the comics were supposed to amplify how important family was for superheroes.  Tim Story turned it into a farce.  It was one bad decision after another.  The sequel was just as bad if not worse.  It was great that they introduced the Silver Surfer into the mix, but when you introduce him, you have to bring in Galactus, the planet-eater.  What they did to Galactus in F4: Rise of the Silver Surfer is absolutely unforgivable.  I’m not saying the character should be completely purple, but the film-makers turned him into an intergalactic cloud of mass destruction.  I’m not exactly the biggest reader of the comics, but I do know that Galactus was not a cloud.  Again, the writing in this movie is so abysmal it ruins any potential emotional impact that the film would otherwise have.  Yeah, some of the action is spectacular and the Silver Surfer is cool, but the movie was just a complete waste of talent.  Thankfully, for Chris Evans, he rebounded in the superhero arena with Captain America.  So, he’s one of the few that came out of the Fantastic Four mess unscathed.  You can also add this franchise to the list of reboots, as they are getting ready to release a new film in August.  Sadly, we’re not likely to see a film of Silver Surfer as the Rise of the Silver Surfer bombed big time.  It’s too bad, he’s a very interesting character.

That’s my list for some of the most disappoint movies based on Marvel and DC licenses.  Yeah, I left out a few like Batman And Robin, but that one is just too damned easy.  The ones in my list are the ones that really could have gotten it right but didn’t.  We’ve got a lot more movies coming our way and hopefully, most of them won’t be disappointing.

 

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Wolverine 3 To Be Jackman’s last X-Men

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According to several sources, it has been confirmed that Hugh Jackman will hang up his claws after finishing the third Wolverine film.  The film would mark nearly 20 years that Hugh Jackman has played the character.  As far as I remember that is the longest that anyone has played a live-action superhero.  The original X-Men, which was released back in 2000, pretty much introduced Jackman to the whole world and made him a superstar overnight.  Say what you will about X-Men, but it was really Hugh Jackman that stole the show.  His turn as the nomadic and amnesiac Logan/Wolverine became iconic.  So much, that nobody else could do it.  As time went on, and as more X-Men movies were made, we not only saw the character of Wolverine grow, but we also saw Mr. Jackman come into his own as an actor.  He used X-Men as a springboard for other projects and films.  Mr. Jackman is an extremely talented individual.  He’s been seen on Broadway multiple times and hosted multiple award shows.  He’s got a great sense of humor and he is very down to earth.  The man’s filmography is extremely impressive, and not just for the X-Men movies.  Some of his best movies include 2013’s Prisoners, which showcased how versatile the man can be.  So, yeah, I’m a fan.

Now, let’s talk about the character of Wolverine.  The origins of Logan/Wolverine have never been really concrete, not in the comics and certainly not the films.  We first meet the character in a backwoods bar somewhere in Canada, while he’s fighting in a ring.  Shortly after, he’s confronted by one of the people he’s beaten to a pulp, and he whips out his adamantium claws.  See, Wolverine’s skeleton is coated in a fictional metal alloy called adamantium, and coupled with his unique healing capabilities, essentially makes him immortal.  The experiments which gave him his adamantium skeleton and claws also made him an amnesiac.  He doesn’t remember anything about his life before it happened, so he’s been wandering the world looking for answers.  After encountering other mutants, Wolverine realizes he’s not alone in the world, but he also realized that there are mutants out there that want to destroy humans, and humans that want to destroy mutants.  Over the course of several movies, we see the character grow from being a lonely wanderer to a reluctant, but dedicated hero.  He does have an attitude problem but at his core, he’s a good person caught in extraordinary circumstances.  While most of the X-Men films claim to not focus on one particular character, at the heart of nearly every movie is Wolverine.  He’s the strong link in the chain.  Wolverine’s character has constantly evolved and become one of the greatest superheroes in comics and in the movies.  Even with the lackluster X-Men Origins, and X-Men: The Last Stand, Hugh Jackman’s presence as Wolverine has been extremely vital to the series, although, First Class only had him show up briefly in an amusing cameo.  X-Men: Days of Future Past is the second film in the series where Wolverine is NOT the central character.  He’s important, to be sure, but the film was more about Xavier and Magneto than it was about Wolverine.  The Wolverine, the second stand-alone film, allows the character to show that he’s not just an animal but a real person with real emotion.  Make not mistake about it, when those claws are out, Wolverine becomes a force to be reckoned with.  He’s essentially unstoppable, unless you happen to be Magneto.

Watching Wolverine grow as a character in the movies over the past 20 years has been extraordinary.  Yeah, there were some movies that weren’t so good.  But most of them have been really spectacular.  Honestly, I don’t think we would have had the X-Men movies without Hugh Jackman.  He’s been instrumental since the beginning, and is basically one of the main reasons why people watch X-Men.  Over the past couple of years, there have been rumblings that Hugh Jackman was going to hang up his claws permanently, but recently, it’s been confirmed.  I honestly can’t say I blame him for stepping away from the character that essentially launched his career.  Unlike Wolverine, Hugh Jackman isn’t immortal.  He’s nearly 50 years old.  Even though he is in stellar shape, his body can only take so much abuse, as with any person.  Will they find somebody else?  Probably.  Will they be as memorable in the role as Hugh Jackman was?  Never say never, but I doubt it.  It’s been a hell of a ride watching Hugh Jackman claw the scenery as the legendary mutant.

“I’m the best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn’t very nice.”

 

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Avengers: Age of Ultron

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Released: May 2015

Director: Joss Whedon

Run Time: 141 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Distributor: Disney/Marvel Studios

Cast:
Robert Downey, Jr.: Tony Stark/Iron Man
Chris Evans: Steve Rogers/Captain America
Chris Hemsworth: Thor
Scarlett Johannson: Natasha Romonov/Black Widow
Jeremy Renner: Clint Barton/Hawkeye
Mark Ruffalo: Bruce Banner/The Hulk
James Spader: Ultron
Elizabeth Olsen: Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch
Aaron Taylor-Johnson: Pietro Maximoff/Quicksilver
Samuel L. Jackson: Nick Fury
Don Cheadle: James Rhodes/War Machine
Paul Bettany: Jarvis/Vision

Back in 2008 when the first Iron Man movie was released, there was a nifty little after-the-credits sequence in which Tony Stark had a small chat with Colonel Nick Fury about “The Avengers Initiative.”  When people saw that, they knew what was coming, but before The Avengers could assemble, we would get movies about Captain America and Thor first.  We got a Hulk movie around the same time Iron Man came out so that was dealt with.  Iron Man got the first sequel before The Avengers hit the screen.  When The Avengers finally hit theaters, it hit with the force of Thor’s hammer.  It was astounding.  Nobody had ever seen an ensemble superhero movie before.  It was massive.  There was a lot of action, great visual effects and it was really fast-paced with an interesting story.  Yeah, alien invasion, but with superheroes!  How could you go wrong?  You couldn’t.  Because we had movies with Iron Man, The Hulk and Thor, we really didn’t need to get into background information on the characters for this movie.  Most of the characters were established, with the exception of Hawkeye and maybe Black Widow.  It really laid the ground for the next phase of Marvel movies known as the MCU or Marvel Cinematic Universe.  After The Avengers had landed, we got sequels to Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America.  We also got a new movie called Guardians of the Galaxy, which ties in loosely with the other movies, but the franchise will become more significant in the future.  On May 1st of this year, we got our first sequel to The Avengers.  How does it fare against the rest of the movies that came before?  Oh, boy….this is going to hurt me more than anything.

The film opens with a bang somewhere in Eastern Europe where our group of heroes are taking on Hydra, the group of terrorists that managed to infiltrate and destroy S.H.I.E.L.D from the inside out.  They’re targeting a specific castle in the region because Hydra managed to get their hands on the scepter that Loki had used during the Battle of New York in the previous film.  Little do they realize that Hydra has a secret weapon, twins who have unique abilities.  One twin, Pietro, is ultra-fast.  The other twin, Wanda, has telekinetic and telepathic powers.  After much destruction, Tony Stark retrieves the scepter but encounters Wanda who shows him his own fears and that eventually leads to Stark returning to a discarded program involving the use of artificial intelligence called Ultron.  The project was to use A.I to help protect the world from extra-terrestrial threats.  Unfortunately, Ultron sees humanity as the ultimate threat.  After seeing the likes of Terminator and The Matrix, a movie centered around people fighting machines doesn’t feel new.  Ultron’s been a part of the comic book scene since the 1960s and is one of The Avengers’ chief villains.  Since Captain America: Civil War, and Avengers: Infinity War have been announced, the story in Avengers: Age of Ultron is nothing more than a setup for the next few movies.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that all these different stories intersect and how each movie is connected.  The whole thing feels like its building up to something huge, and it doesn’t quite get there.

Joss Whedon definitely knows how to structure an action film and the action in Avengers: Age of Ultron is amazing.  It’s absolutely fantastic.  Obviously, there are big explosions, gun play and plenty of smashing to go around.  The opening of the film is one of the most action-packed scenes that I’ve seen in a major blockbuster.  That’s how you start an action film.  It also doesn’t really let up.  Yeah, there are some slow moments for character development, but it’s mostly just run-and-gun.  I love it.  The acting is superb, with all the main superheroes returning from the previous film.  There is an interesting addition: Quicksilver.  Quicksilver has the benefit of appearing in not just one Marvel film, but two.  The first that he appeared in was X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Age of Ultron.  They’re played by different actors and have different motivations, but it was quite interesting to see.  The main villain, Ultron, is voiced by the criminally underrated James Spader.  Yeah, he’s definitely threatening, but he’s also amusing at the same time as he gets some of the film’s best lines.  That’s also one of the biggest issues I have with the film: The humor.  I’m not saying that Avengers: Age of Ultron needs to be dark and gritty like The Dark Knight, but it seems like in every major situation, jokes are tossed around even when things are deathly serious.  It’s a distraction.  One of my issues with the previous Avengers was with Hawkeye.  Here, he’s given a whole lot more to do and is the emotional anchor of the team, and it’s really refreshing to see Jeremy Renner really flex his acting muscles here.  Robert Downey, Jr is always reliable as Stark, Chris Evans is still amazing as Captain America, and Mark Ruffalo simply inhabits his role of Bruce Banner.  The movie still has it’s amazing ensemble.

Sadly, there are quite a few things that really don’t work.  The relationship between Banner and Black Widow doesn’t feel natural.  It seems forced, and the way she gets the Hulk to calm down is…..well, let’s just say it’s suggestive.  The addition of additional superheroes really gives the film a bloated feel.  I mean, it’s cool to see Vision as part of the team.  He’s played by Paul Bettany, who does a good job, but he just feels like a fifth wheel.  Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch have much larger role, though, so that’s good.  There are elements in Age of Ultron that are clearly setting up for Civil War.  There’s a sequence that takes place in a cave that seems out of place.  Apparently there were issues between Joss Whedon and Marvel about what to include in this movie.  It shows, because some of the film doesn’t feel entirely fleshed out.  Ultron’s motives for wiping out humanity seem pretty generic to me.  He’s a visually interesting character that just doesn’t feel like a major threat.  Again, this goes back to whole humanity vs. machines deal that has been done to death.  Avengers: Age of Ultron just doesn’t feel like it’s trying anything new.  I’m not going to say I hate the movie, I don’t.  But I am severely disappointed that this was the end result.  Maybe it’s because my expectations were so freaking high after the last movie, that anything less than what the previous Avengers delivered was going to be disappointing.  Maybe that’s the case, and maybe I need to see it again.  First impressions are often the most important, and my first impression of Avengers: Age of Ultron was not really a good one.  It’s not a bad movie by any stretch, I will be picking it up on Blu-Ray when it’s available, but it really feels like a major step backwards for Whedon and company.  Rumor is that this movie is going to be Joss Whedon’s last entry into the Marvel universe.  I don’t know how credible that is, but it might be a good thing.  It’s a fluke that the first film turned out as well as it did.  Age of Ultron just doesn’t live up to the previous film are any of the others in the MCU.  My final verdict is a 7/10.  I’m really hoping that Captain America: Civil War, and Infinity War will be off the charts.  It’s what they are building towards.