Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson Director: Joss Whedon

    ASSEMBLING the Avengers wasn’t easy, but it turns out that keeping them together is a far tougher task. That’s the lesson both the heroes and writer-director Joss Whedon discover in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” a sequel to the 2012 commercial behemoth that can’t quite recapture the novelty and giddy good time of the first instalment.

    As “Ultron” begins, the Avengers — Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) — seem to have thwarted their primary foes, leaving them relieved and looking forward to some much-needed downtime. But Iron Man (a.k.a. Tony Stark), wanting to create an A.I. defence system that can protect the globe far better than the Avengers could, accidentally gives birth to a malevolent computer intelligence named Ultron (voiced by James Spader). Housed in a robot body, Ultron seeks to bring peace to the world by eradicating the Avengers, and then all of humankind.

    The original movie was partly devoted to bringing together these disparate superheroes, and much of the drama and humor comes from them trying to learn to work together as a unified fighting force. Perhaps inevitably, Ultron suffers in comparison because Whedon (who also wrote and directed the first film) has already explored the tensions and odd pairings that would occur when different comic-book titans are forced to coexist. Instead, in “Ultron” he tries to flesh out those interpersonal relationships, finding the most success with a tentative romantic relationship between Black Widow (a.k.a. Natasha Romanoff) and the Hulk (a.k.a. Bruce Banner), which, both of them realize, is intensely problematic because of his inability to control his rage-induced transformation into the muscular, green-skinned monster.

    As with the 2012 instalment, “Ultron” doesn’t just have to make sure to find screen time for so many characters but, more crucially, give each of them enough of an emotional arc so that those heroes’ individual fans won’t feel short-changed. This necessitates a bit of dramatic déjà vu: Stark has to contend yet again with his guilt about the lucrative weapons company his family created, Captain America (a.k.a. Steve Rogers) must continue to cope with the fact that everyone he knew from the 1940s is gone, Banner is still struggling with his condition, and so on.

    If all those individual through-lines didn’t make Whedon’s job complicated enough, he also assigns the Avengers an arc as a group. “Ultron,” with the help of a mutant mind-controller (Elizabeth Olsen) and her twin brother (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who has super-speed, wants to tear apart the Avengers from within, believing that their fragile bond can be easily shattered. Their plan proves successful, leaving our heroes wondering if they’re actually that valuable to society working as a team.

    Unfortunately, these furrowed-brow musings about teamwork, justice and loyalty mostly slow down the movie’s momentum, creating too many scenes where different members of the Avengers crew wrestle with personal demons in not entirely satisfying ways.

    Whedon does his best character work when he puts the Avengers in the thick of an extended third-act battle with Ultron in which the very fate of the planet hangs in the balance. Rather than engaging in the chin-stroking dialogue that can dominate the movie’s early sections, the Avengers demonstrate themes of self-sacrifice and bravery through bold action near the end, and as a result “Ultron” concludes on a thrilling, visceral, intensely emotional note.

    Viewers who don’t care about subtle character shadings will be happy to know that “Ultron” provides ample action from the first frames. However, the preponderance of CGI in the battle scenes can lead to a distancing feeling as we watch weightless avatars flying to and fro, the characters often bantering with hit-or-miss quips that only underline the unreality of the situations. Still, give Whedon credit for manufacturing a finale that, for the umpteenth time in the history of cinema, makes us concerned that the human race could be wiped out at a moment’s notice. Despite how overstuffed “Age Of Ultron” can be, he’s a filmmaker with an eye out for the emotional underpinnings that make all the spectacle compelling.

    The movie is now being screened in Shenzhen. (SD-Agencies)