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Avengers: Age of Ultron

Had a look at Avengers: Age of Ultron a few days ago. Seems to be doing good business at the worldwide box office - around 1.4 billion at the mo but two thirds of that is from outside the US. Maybe this is why most of the action ISN'T set in the US (Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, South Korea - incidentally, Sokovia and Wakanda BUT New York and South Korea??). I like the fact that the leads are saving 'people' not just 'Americans' as is usually the case in Hollywood moolah spunk-fests.

A couple of new characters - Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver - slotted into the film well enough, though their back story differed from the X-Men one. Here they're referred to as 'enhanced', not mutants. This has something to do with legal wranglings between Marvel and Fox. Not sure about their casting, especially Taylor-Johnson as the fast one. He's super bland.

In contrast to Paul Bettany as The Vision. His entrance, including the hammer pay-off, is probably the highlight of the flick for me and he has a great riposte to Ultron near the end of the film. The Black Widow and Hulk almost-rom works quite well and serves as a nice humanistic aside to the smashy-smashy. In fact, the folk least well served in the first movie seem to get a lot more to do here. Barton (Hawkeye) has more depth and a few key scenes, including some self-deprecating stuff about his skill-set. Romanoff (Widow) and Banner (Hulk) have a number of nice scenes together as well. But of the three purported main characters - Iron Man, Captain America and Thor - Downey Jnr still steals the show. Thor is a little marginalised (the cave scene was curiously adjunct) and Cap is just bog standard-boring but he can throw a mean shield.

The action set-pieces are well choreographed and directed, Hulk v Stark a highlight. The introduction of Ultron at the end of Stark's soiree is quite well done too. But alas, this has another in the growing line of 'things falling from the air' climaxes, this time a city. And I'm getting a bit cocked off with the old 'last dog saved' and 'my child, my child! Somebody save him, please!' nonsense.You'll know what I mean if you've seen the film.

So overall, nothing new but bags of fun and I think I prefer this film to the first one. Some of the writing is top-notch and keeping something this big together must have been a fucking massive green headache for Whedon and his team. Kudos to them.

Nice little point of interest from imdb - 'In Avengers, Banner is shown becoming Hulk but is never shown converting back to Banner. In this movie, Banner is never shown becoming Hulk but is shown reverting back to Banner'. One for the nerds.

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