The Avengers: Age Of Ultron

The second Avengers installment has the team going up against the accidentally created artificial intelligence of Ultron (James Spader).  Cutting to the chase, Age Of Ultron is descent enough with the type of action we've come to expect from the Marvel world, but it's just like it's story and ever growing characters, a bit bloated.  There are good attempts by director and writer Joss Whedon to explore and further develop the characters, particularly with characters Banner and Black Widow, but even at 141 minutes, it's a far too ambitious undertaking, and so the allusions to the lapsed time period since the last fiasco, feel forced and campy, even with the rather good editing. Here, the cgi is way too obvious an effect however cool, as in the opening sequence which felt more like the trailer of an Xbox or Playstation game.  So it becomes a problem of how do you align that tongue and cheek humor and character development and growing conflict of the last installment among the Avengers, with the seriousness of the stakes at hand.  To it's credit however, Age Of Ultron does introduce us to some great new characters, minus Ultron who seems even in this age of technology to be improbable and disappointing as a foe.  But if the Transformers AI characters could do it, you'd think. Underlying themes of AI and what it means to be conscious and all the other deeper implications were not lost on me in the effort: but in this case, I wasn't impressed.   I also like that this installment seems like other movies to be taking story direction and character cues from films like 2009's Watchmen.  The strong and perhaps universal selling point for me was watching the Avengers all coordinate and work together, simple as that. It would probably be easy to conclude that I didn't like the movie and that would be wrong.  I just was expecting more quality and a better pacing, not everything thrown out there at once rather heavy handed in segments.