Review: ‘Avengers Two’ – 30 seconds of pleasure

In “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” there are 30 excellent seconds in which the flirtatious Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) mixes a dark cocktail for the taciturn Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo). One can almost imagine they are the doomed heroes of a new 3-D film noir. But inevitably she must become Black Widow and he must become the Hulk and the other two hours and 20-and-a-half minutes of the film have to happen.

The duration may be unnecessarily bloated but it takes time to collect reaction shots to the misogynistic jokes of Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, like the one directed at Natasha: “You and Banner better not be playing hide the zucchini.”

The camera must pan across the whole Avengers gang: Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hawkeye, Nick Fury, War Machine, a couple dozen others. In addition to their names in the credits, there ought to be a countdown of how many more superhero films the actors must make before they complete their Marvel contracts.

To further crowd the scene, two new mutants (Russian twins no less!) are introduced: the fleet-footed Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, a sorceress who clouds the Avengers’ visions with waking nightmares.

They are pawns for the James Spader-voiced Ultron, the physical embodiment of an all-powerful computer program loosed “in the internet.” Like all proper villains, he is a philosopher, sprinkling his dastardly proclamations with quotes from Jesus and Pinocchio. Much as Nabokov imagined the kingdom of Zembla in “Pale Fire,” director Joss Whedon begins and ends the story in Sokovia, a fictional Soviet-bloc country easily overrun by Putin’s, or rather Ultron’s, minions.

Ultron’s unending army of robots is ideal because they can be sundered onscreen in a way humans cannot, their limbs and heads ripped off in cutting edge CGI. The film has all the beauty and narrative coherence of a kaleidoscope.

• • •

“Avengers: Age of Ultron” is showing at the Sonoma 9 Cinemas. Rated PG-13 and running time is 2:21. Visit cinemawest.com.