Search found 1 match: James Spader

Whether you’re a huge comic book nerd constantly orgasming over the current trend of superhero films or you’re the illegitimate offspring of Jim Jarmusch lamenting the current state of Hollywood, it’s hard to disagree that the first Avengers film, titled The Avengers, changed our collective perception of what a superhero film could be. At the very least, nothing like it had been attempted before and it had to convince those who weren’t on board with each lead-in film. Of course, after its rousing success, a sequel was quickly announced, and excitement was had all around. The question would then become: can Whedon and co. keep this fire burning? We get our first glimpse to the answer of this question with Avengers: Age of Ultron.

(Mild spoilers below)

I’m in a state of denial about Age of Ultron because I really do like it a lot, but it’s far from flawless. It’s not as good as the first film, but it’s also solidly entertaining. There’s no reason on the surface as to why this sequel shouldn’t be as good as the first film because on the surface they are the exact same film. This isn’t, for once, a bad thing. Whedon is a smart writer and he knows how to properly change things in order to keep things fresh. And indeed, from the start it appears as though Age of Ultron is picking up from where the first film left off: the team is pre-assembled and storming a Hydra facility. Whedon is even smart enough to showcase the “all our favorite heroes in one shot” moment right here in the opening sequence, as if to say “you know what this is, so let’s skip the formalities and jump in!” But really, this sequence can be swapped for the opening sequence of the first film, which sets up Loki as the main villain.

But here’s where our first issue sprouts: the film opens on a sequence that the first film built its full length up to, so now Age of Ultron has nowhere to go but up… quite literally. I remember my friend saying he was getting sick of Marvel movies raising the stakes in the final act by having to deal with things high up in the air (think about it and he’s right – nearly all of them do this, even the better ones like Iron Man 3 and Guardians of the Galaxy) and psst, they don’t do anything differently for Age of Ultron. It’s an original crisis, sure, but it’s still one that forces our heroes against the perils of gravity. We are following a formula and the trouble is Age of Ultron is no exception to the rule – it can’t even push the limits of expectations.

Age of Ultron follows a shockingly similar path of the first one while feeling like a different movie. It’s an accomplishment on Whedon’s behalf because not only was juggling six heroes evenly and satisfyingly thought an impossible task before he nailed it with The Avengers, he’s now got two to three more superhero balls thrown into the juggling act and he’s starting to wobble. So he stuck with the same structure to avoid a headache, I’m sure. It’s traceable with a pencil:

-Loki arrives, causes crisis/Avengers storm stronghold (opening action sequence).
-Avengers assemble begrudgingly under threat of Loki/Avengers assemble for party and are introduced to threat of Ultron.
-Avengers are manipulated by Loki and bicker, Loki escapes/Avengers are manipulated by someone, Ultron escapes.
-Avengers are down. Need rousing! Teamwork!/Avengers are down. Need rousing! Teamwork! Gillette shaving cream in the foreground!
-Final battle in populated city against countless identical disposable enemies to stop Loki’s/Ultron’s plan.

So even though the action is all technically new, and Whedon explores new neat ways to do cool things, we’re still reliving the first film while watching a second one. And it’s when you notice this that the tension the first film had melts away.

There’s a lot going against the Avengers in the first film and Whedon manages to make each character feel fallible. Hawkeye is under Loki’s spell, Iron Man nearly gets sliced in half trying to jump-start a giant helecarrier turbine, Cap is trying not to fall thousands of feet off said helecarrier, Hulk is going bonkers and has met his match with Thor. While we’re dealing with green monsters that can eat bullets and gods, there are still moments of inescapable tension. At one point Loki locks Thor in a reinforced glass cell built to contain the Hulk and opens the ejection hatch beneath it, saying, “The humans think us immortal. Shall we test that?” Perfect, absolutely perfect. We actually feel like Thor could die here.

When the Avengers have their minds manipulated in Age of Ultron, they’re transported to painful memories and forced to relive them, re-feel them. All right, that’s totally fair, I’m along for the ride. It even sends Hulk into a rage and forces Stark to activate his Hulkbuster suit, and while it’s probably one of the most fun sequences in the film, it doesn’t exactly have a consequence. Our heroes just kind of chop some wood and shake it off.

There’s even another moment of Avengers in-fighting leading to violence like there was in the first film, but it’s rushed and lacks all of the cinematic qualities of the first film. It also doesn’t go anywhere because while, sure, it’s characteristic of Stark and Rogers to disagree ideologically, we the audience know what’s going to end up happening. Even people like me, who read one comic book when he was a child and never developed a taste for them, have been exposed to enough fan theories to know what the relationship between Jarvis and Ultron results in.

I had fun watching the film, there’s no doubt about that. Age of Ultron is still better than any single-hero film out so far, but it spends too much time dwelling on the future of a franchise that will only die when Disney does. It introduces new characters while giving half-hearted goodbyes to others because we know nobody ever really says goodbye for good in these films. There’s not enough time focused on the film itself as an entity. This is evident in just the villain alone.

Just to preface this: I love James Spader. I’ve loved him since my Mom introduced me to him as this quippy late-season addition to The Practice. I then watched Boston Legal solely because of him and William Shatner and he blew me away as an actor. He’s got an undeniable talent and screen presence and his vocal prowess is matched by few in the industry. So naturally when he was announced as the main baddie for the next Avengers flick, I was excited as hell. And here’s the thing: he nails Ultron, at least as far as he can with Whedon’s screenplay. He is 100% down for this role and appears to relish in it, but he’s the only reason Ultron is memorable. Whedon can’t decide who Ultron is. Is he this untouchable, completely all-knowing force of destruction – in other words, a total and complete match for the Avengers? Or is he a jokester, a Loki 2.0, who relies heavily on the powers of those he’s coerced to his side rather than his own power as an intangible entity? He’s one, then the other. The construction of his physical form is never explained in the movie, and that’s a nice touch because it doesn’t have to be; by this point it’s established that he’s an intangible A.I. that can literally travel wherever he wants by technological infrastructure. He is and he isn’t every disposable robot in the film. He can fight Captain America in one body and fend off Black Widow with two others. That’s intimidating and a smart writing tool with which to create tension. But then Ultron uses other people as a crutch to do his bidding, to battle the Avengers while he grapples with Iron Man, and all the while he’s making jokes and not understanding the biology of human limbs. It’s a toss-up of which Ultron you’re going to get, and by the end you realize that even after he’s upgraded his body to the same metal as that in Cap’s shield, he’s really quite helpless as a villain. It robs him of any intimidating shadow he might’ve otherwise cast over the entire film. There isn’t a point in the whole film, except for maybe during his first monologue in the broken robot body, that Ultron feels like someone with the upper hand over the Avengers. Especially not by the end of the film when we introduce our third – count ‘em, third – new hero, someone who is literally explained to us as more powerful than anyone else, including Ultron. So ultimately, the exhausting final act is more fun in the sense of “big explosion go boom” than “oh man look at Iron Man whiz around getting tactical points from Hawkeye, oh man he just reflected his laser off Cap’s shield into a guy, Thor just fried that guy – oh jeeze the Hulk just ripped that thing apart and shoved a sharp metal piece in that floaty worm’s head – OH MAN AND THOR JUST HAMMERED IT INTO ITS SKULL. THIS IS TENSE!” It’s still fun, it’s just not wow fun.

I came out of that movie thinking, “Ultron could’ve been in that twice as much and I would’ve been okay with that”, which is weird because he’s probably not in this film any less than Loki is in the first and I felt satisfied with the first film. I initially wrote it off as my totally understandable admiration for James Spader, but no… if Spader had gotten more screen time doing the same thing, I still wouldn’t have been satisfied. In the end, it’s because Age of Ultron doesn’t spend enough time on itself, it spends too much time looking ahead. It feels more like a rung on a ladder whereas the first film felt like the culmination of something – the bombastic end result of a long journey. The very idea that Age of Ultron can’t stop thinking about the next step while it can’t even surpass the step its predecessor took makes me cynical and tired and zaps away a lot of enthusiasm for future films. The fact that Whedon couldn’t push this franchise any further than he had last time depresses me when I think about how this franchise will literally never end; Disney will get to the point where Chris Evans’s grandson will be playing Captain America. So the question is no longer how long can they keep this fire burning, but how long until this fire is totally extinguished? In other words, how long until I don’t give a shit anymore because there’s so many of these goddamn things and they all start to blend together and, most importantly, the fun dissipates? Age of Ultron is good enough that I wouldn’t consider it the beginning of the end, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the start of that slippery slope wasn’t just around the corner. Whedon was wise to get out now. He’s done the best he could and he’s given us a pair of damn fun comic book movies.