![]() He holds his own against his much more powerful allies Thor (Chris Hemsworth) or Captain America (Chris Evans). Even more than in the first film, Whedon injects humor into almost every scene, grounding the preposterous goings-on with laughs: At one point, Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) seems to read the audience’s mind by exclaiming “The city is flying, we’re fighting an army of robots, and I have a bow and arrow!” But to Whedon’s credit, Hawkeye doesn’t come off as outmatched and out of place this time. A fight between an angry Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), sporting his Hulkbuster armor, is a showstopper, funny and rousing and imaginative all at the same time. At times, the images resemble panels of a comic book, with careful compositions and visuals (including a fantastic use of a mega-zoom during one of the battles) that don’t feel like more of the same-old. The big setpieces in Age of Ultron - and there are many - reveal Whedon has become a formidable choreographer of thrilling, furious action. ![]() Despite all its commercial and (inexplicable) critical success, the first picture was an impersonal, lugubrious drag, peppered with brief sparks of excitement and imagination. ![]() When Whedon was given the keys to the first Avengers movie, he had directed only one other film before ( Serenity), and his inexperience with juggling all the moving parts of such an enormous enterprise showed. Whedon is having a blast here, his camera careening across the battlefield with rib-tickling speed, and this time, you’re able to hop on and take the ride alongside him. Where the first film often bore the whiff of laborious obligation, reintroducing characters we already knew from other movies and explaining how they wound up fighting on the same team, the new movie gets to the fun stuff right from the opening shot: A long, uninterrupted take during which each of Earth’s mightiest heroes makes a rousing entrance during a raid on a mountainside compound in an Eastern European country. Joss Whedon has announced he won’t be making any more Marvel Studios movies - the five years he spent writing and directing The Avengers and its sequel, Age of Ultron, wore him out - which is too bad, because he was starting to get really good at it.
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