The first Avengers film was not quite a good movie, but it was a marvel of narrative efficiency with Whedon job mostly reduced to keep as many balls rolling as he can while adding some grace notes in the sidelines (in some ways it was the high point of early Marvel aesthetics of combining a bland surface and undervalued quirk personalities to add some flavor to it, a formula they seem to have mostly abandon this past 2 years after deciding people enjoy those bland surfaces well enough). Age of Ultron is a good deal more ambitious which unfortunate is part of its limitations. The plot is more character based with Whedon putting a futile earnest effort to serve a dozen actors well and there's some genuine desire to dig into American exceptionalism (not always with success) and build things around its characters eminent loneliness. The final result is just a huge mess, it is both overlong and feels like at least half hour worth of connective scenes that needed to be there got cut. It has no sense of how to move from one big setpiece to the next. Plots that are important either seem to come out of nowhere or get dropped without resolution, for instance it is good to see Whedon actually trying to do something with Iron Man's past as an arms merchant but I can only assume a big scene between him and the twins end up on the cutting room floor and without the whole subplot goes nowhere (overall this ilm seem to equal givenhints of things of actually use them to add depth). The action is way too chaotic and this is such a comic book film it often confounds angsty melodrama for character work. There is way too much heroes fighting heroes scenes (that said the nerd inside me will never be against the 50 year honored Avengers tradition of Iron Man trying to take a short cut, Captain America getting all self-righteous about it, they coming to blows and Thor getting to settle it). The last act is very questionable politically, but it is good to get a Marvel film that at least puts some actual stakes into saving people over simple destroying things. I also enjoy how Whedon uses Hawkeye's guy with a bow and arrow number to ground the action even if his script gets to cute overexplaning what he is doing. If this felt under control it might have amount to something but as it stand it is the a lot of cliff notes that go nowhere.