Avengers: Age of Ultron review – fighting super-fatigue

No doubt the latest Avengers romp – sequel to the third most successful movie of all time – will drag in huge coin and win many friends, but, for this viewer, the sound of tiny Fonzies jumping distant sharks marred the enjoyment.

The point at which that noise becomes impossible to ignore arrives in a scene that finds one Avenger bursting into violent chaos and asking: "Okay, what's the drill?" He is pointed towards something like an actual drill. A hospital? It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now.

More often, the humour falls into the following deadening pattern: big bang, bigger bang, undercutting quip from Robert Downey Jr. It’s the same template the Bond team devised 50 years ago to excuse the preposterous nature of the spy’s adventures (“I think he got the point”, etc).

Nobody is suggesting that Age of Ultron – a slickly made picture featuring consistently good performances – has reached the depths of Octopussy, but the film-makers' understandable inability to take their own material seriously has now pushed the project beyond gentle parody and into broad pastiche. There is something of the Adam West-era Batman about the enterprise.

We begin in media res with the team in final pursuit of Loki's sceptre. After a reasonable amount of chaos, they settle down for celebratory drinks in the manner of the Tracy brothers from Thunderbirds.

Tony Stark then announces a new plan. He has constructed an artificially intelligent programme named Ultron that will protect the Earth more efficiently than even this band of gods, mutants, cyborgs and (he’s still there) archers. What could go wrong?

To be fair to writer-director Joss Whedon, little time is wasted before a malign ghost is introduced to the machine. As such entities are wont to do in science fiction, Ultron concludes that the planet could be best served by the elimination of the humans upon it. A large battle breaks out.

There are ways of making such characters less preposterous. The film arrives as Netflix's Daredevil presses its very persuasive case for a rougher, less ironic variation on superhero myth-making. Forced to clatter among an absurdly busy array of characters, Whedon has, however, little time for anything more than the hurried one-liner.

The better known personalities have the benefits of familiarity on their side and, key traits thus filled in, are free to deliver easily digestible guest performances. Think Kenneth Williams and Hattie Jacques in Carry on Doctor.

The lesser players are not so fortunate. What are we to make of the ludicrous Mittel-European twins played by charisma-vacuum Aaron Taylor-Johnson and sadly misused Elizabeth Olsen? He is Billy Whizz from the Beano. She is asked to speak in the voice of an end-of-the-pier mystic while curling her hands like Mystic Meg in a 1980s byline photograph.

Looking more embarrassed as each episode progresses, Jeremy Renner is still unable to explain why, when fighting global annihilation, Hawkeye would be any more use than, well, any other man with a bow and arrow.

No wonder Whedon is unable to play it straight for even an instant. The promiscuous spread of characters has dealt him a near-unplayable hand. At one stage, Stark is dispatched to a rural garage for no other reason than the statutory requirement to locate Samuel Jackson’s Nick Fury in at least one poorly lit corner.

In the first Avengers episode, Whedon still had enough enthusiasm to vary the gags with invention. Now we’re left with Thor speaking funny, Hulk ending villainous pomposity with a dig, and Captain America being quaintly old fashioned.

There is, of course, enough action to go around. Tolerant aficionados will savour the supposedly tantalising indicators to future plot developments. Scarlett Johansson, Robert Downey Jr and Mark Ruffalo all put shoulders to the wheel. But the Tulip Fever that is superhero mania must, surely, be close to breaking.

And stop calling me Shirley.