This is easily the most anticipated release of the year and, as the follow-up to the incredibly successful first film which I couldn’t stop gushing about, expectations for it were very high. The media blitz prior to its release was so relentless that it sometimes felt as if you’ve already watched most of the movie spread across the various teasers. Unfortunately while I’ve always suspected that this would have a hard time matching up to the first one, even those lowered expectations were largely dashed.

Age of Ultron picks up after the events of The Winter Soldier with the full team going after one of the toughest Hydra bases to date. They recover Loki’s scepter from the base and Tony Stark uses it to empower Ultron, a program that he had been working on it protect the entire world. Not surprisingly this turns out to be a bad idea since Ultron immediately goes rogue and tries to kill all of them. At the same time, the Avengers need to contend with two “enhanced humans” who seem to the result of Hydra’s experiments: the MCU’s version of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, who everyone is eager to point out are very definitely not mutants.

One thing that can be said in its favor is that this film doesn’t lack for action. There’s plenty of it, they’re staged well and the bullet-time effects actually look pretty good. I also liked how time they spent showing the team going out of the way to save civilians, to remind the audience that they are indeed the heroes. I also found it kind of cool that they threw in just about all of the other supporting characters from the previous movies. Now all of the attentive fans can’t complain about what all of the other heroes were doing during this moment of crisis.

Still, even the action scenes fall far short of the first film. The first problem is that Ultron never feels like a serious threat. He’s just not portrayed as being powerful enough. In one scene, Captain America is warned that he’s no match for Ultron one-on-one. Yet not only does he proceed to hold his own, he even effortlessly shrugs off several energy blasts without being able to interpose his shield. As Ultron later demonstrates using the machineguns aboard the Quinjet, kinetic weapons are just better. As others have pointed out, the final battle of an army of Ultrons against the Avengers is too reminiscent of the first film, except that the Ultrons seem weaker. They should have just gone with one single gigantic Ultron body rendered nigh-indestructible with vibranium.

The second problem is that the fights lack emotional heft. There is so much action so quickly that nothing really stands out. Remember all of those little crowning moments of awesome in the first movie, like the Hulk stopping a giant Chitauri worm-like machine with a single punch, or Captain America being interrupted by a Chitauri grunt while talking to the police, or even the powerful moment when Loki stabs Agent Coulson in the back? There are precious few such memorable moments in Age of Ultron. Maybe you’ll remember Iron Man in Hulkbuster armor piston-punching Hulk in the face. That’s it.

I haven’t even gotten started yet with how awful the writing and the dialogue is. There are some good ideas, the relationship between the Black Widow and the Hulk being the best of them. But the film has the nasty habit to throwing plot points into the air and then completely forgetting about them. A confrontation between Captain America and Iron Man feels like something with a great deal of dramatic potential, but then Thor steps in between them and it’s all over. Hawkeye’s wife reminds him about his duty to keep the team together and absolutely nothing comes out of it. The attempt to give the Maximoff twins some backstory is so perfunctory you wonder why they even tried. Needless to say, adding yet another new character, the Vision, into the mix is just another albatross around a movie that is already groaning under the weight of everything already in it.

Throughout the whole thing, my impression is that everyone involved in this film, from Joss Whedon on down to the performers, maybe even including Kevin Feige, is getting a bit sick and tired of the MCU. There’s no passion in it, no love for the characters. They’re just doing it for the paychecks and hoping that the things that worked before will work again. Having Dr. Cho quietly pine after Thor is a perfect example of this. It was funny in the first couple of Thor movies, but pulling it out again here just seems sad.

At the time that I write this, it’s come out that the version that Whedon originally handed in ran to three and a half hours. That certainly would explain why so many of the scenes seem so disjointed. Maybe there will be something in those missing sixty minutes that will explain why the Avengers need a new facility at the end of the movie or why Tony Stark is walking away from the team or how it is that an ancient artifact like the mind gem could contain an artificial intelligence. I’m still kind of glad that Whedon has announced that he’s done with the MCU for the foreseeable future and wants to use the money he’s earned from the Avengers to develop his own properties.

As disappointing as this was, it’s still a decent action movie though it ranks near the bottom of the MCU releases to date. I even have to admit that I’m still onboard for the sequels. I can’t very well skip over the movie version of the Infinity Gauntlet, can I?