In which Iron Man and Hulk fight

Rating: 9/10 (11 May 2015)

The second Avengers movie is one of those that just plain makes me happy. And, judging by the box office so far, it's made a lot of other people happy as well. It's a grand continuation of the adventures of familiar characters, but it's so witty, original, and exciting that it's also a terrific stand-alone film.
The gang's still around, even though their former employer SHIELD is not. Captain America (Chris Evans) leads the team as they try to root out the last of the HYDRA cells. They do, and they recapture the scepter of Loki, who does not appear in this movie. This leads Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to decide to revive a dormant AI program, all in the name of peacekeeping, because those things never go wrong. It's clear that Stark would rather move on to do something other than save the world every couple of days, and so he figures the new AI, Ultron, can finally bring peace to the world. Whoopsie! Spoiler alert: It does no such thing.
The really awful thing about Ultron isn't that he's super-intelligent and powerful (even more so than JARVIS, Stark's AI-servant), it's that he can pop up in any machine, anywhere, because that's just what you'd expect an evil machine to do - upload himself to the Internet and wreak some havoc.
Ultron (James Spader) comes across twins who are totally not mutants at all because that would infringe on Fox's X-Men copyright - Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who's fast, and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), who's good with the mind games. The bad guy plans to use the duo's loathing of Tony Stark (it's complicated) to help him rid the world of the Avengers.
Meanwhile, inner conflicts begin to brew among our heroes. Is Stark truly selfish and not a team player? Can Hulk totally Hulk out without making the civilian populace terrified of him? Is Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) able to deal with her own demons long enough to establish a relationship with Banner? And is Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) good for anything? Joss Whedon once said (reportedly) that working with the Avengers characters is much more demanding than working with, say, the X-Men characters, because the latter share common problems (i.e., they're mutants). The Avengers have different problems from one another, different personalities, and different enemies. One is a god from another realm, and another is in his eighties (technically). So it's not just a matter of getting them to work together as a team against a single enemy, as the different backgrounds sometimes run counter to each other.
Of all of the characters, though, I think Black Widow is the most layered. We know that Natasha has been through an awful lot, even compared with her teammates, and that's why she's more or less a closed book to them. I also think Johannsson provides an exciting, vulnerable, empowering performance. She's not just playing a superhero - she's a full-fledged character.
There are some familiar faces, too - Nick Fury pops up. Sidekicks (sort of?) for I-Man and Cap also make appearances. There is much joking; hilarity often ensues. There's a new layer of levity, in fact. There's an early scene in which Cap takes out a bunch of henchmen with his shield and mutters (paraphrasing here) "Well, that was fun." This is followed by, off-screen, "No, it wasn't!" Hee! Hee! With the panache of an old-time serial and the touch of the pathos of a Douglas Sirk drama, the Avengers sequel is a visionary omnibus of meshing styles and genres. I'd call it the pinnacle of comic-book movies, but we have at least two more Avengers films - plus Ant-Man, another Captain America, and on and on.