Action done right

Rating: 7/10 (19 March 2016)

"Avengers: Age of Ultron" raises the age-old question of just how much freedom we should be willing to sacrifice in order to ensure a lasting peace. And, as a corollary, how much power should humans be willing to cede to technology, particularly in the form of artificial intelligence, to achieve that goal? It's a theme that more than a few works of science fiction have dealt with over the years.
In this sequel to the box office smash of 2012, Ray Stark, aka Iron Man, has invented a program called Ultron whose purpose is to eliminate the need for war and global conflict altogether. To no one's surprise but Stark's, when the program is prematurely activated, it turns out to have less than noble intentions as it sets about creating a race of cyborg warriors to completely eradicate humans from the face of the planet and to repopulate it with others like himself.
Only the Avengers (embodied by Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Don Cheadle, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Remmer, et. al.) can save the day. And save it they do, amidst supercharged action sequences and jaw-dropping special effects.
Stark certainly means well as he sets about essentially eliminating the need for the Avengers at all, but we in the audience know this is a fool's errand from the start for, if successful, there would be no more entries in this highly lucrative franchise. And we certainly couldn't have that, now, could we?