Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

IMDb plot summary: When Tony Stark tries to jumpstart a dormant peacekeeping program, things go awry and it is up to the Avengers to stop the villainous Ultron from enacting his terrible plans.
Directed by Joss Whedon. Starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, and Chris Evans.

There's no doubt my husband was way more excited about this movie than I was. I found the first Avengers movie underwhelming, despite the involvement of Joss Whedon, one of my all-time favorite people. My complaints were mostly 1) the film was incredibly scattered with the Avengers off doing their own thing for the most part, and 2) there wasn't nearly enough fun Whedonesque dialogue that I expected. The movie that *did* meet those expectations, oddly enough, was Guardians of the Galaxy. Guardians is what I wanted The Avengers to be.

Age of Ultron fixes a lot of those problems. For the first time, it seems like we get to see them being a team. The characters are given more depth and growth as opposed to the last one. The few new characters it introduces are interesting. (James Spader is clearly the best of the bunch as Ultron himself.)

That being said, it's neither fun enough nor special enough for me to want to rewatch it ever. I'm perfectly happy for Whedon to take a step back from working on Marvel and start creating his own characters again. Then maybe he can kill people off without Marvel magically resurrecting them for TV spin-offs...

3 stars.

How it entered my Flickchart:
Avengers: Age of Ultron > Minority Report
Avengers: Age of Ultron < Eat Pray Love
Avengers: Age of Ultron < You've Got Mail
Avengers: Age of Ultron > Tarzan
Avengers: Age of Ultron > Flypaper
Avengers: Age of Ultron > 12 Years a Slave
Avengers: Age of Ultron < To Sir, With Love
Avengers: Age of Ultron < Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
Avengers: Age of Ultron < A Separation
Avengers: Age of Ultron > Adam
Avengers: Age of Ultron < I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK
Final spot: #915 out of 2352.