Joss Whedon's follow-up to his superheroes-learning-to-get-along hit The Avengers turns out to be more of a follow-through, an enormously dense setup for the sprawling What's Next of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. To wit: there's these Infinity Stones, the most powerful destructive forces in the universe, and someone is out to get them. Whedon is mostly up to the task of keeping all his brightly colored balls in the air, though he's not above using some glib speechmaking and ridiculous action to divert your attention and keep your questions at bay. As for What's Now: after the alien invasion of the earlier film, swaggering tech genius Tony Stark decides that the whole planet could use a suit of armor, that is, an army of robot defenders. Oh, and he needs to give them artificial intelligence; that way, everybody can stop being superheroes and get down to the business of ordinary life. Needless to say, things don't work out as planned, and the rest of the film is spent trying to correct the mistake of building a smartbot who has the good sense to ask, "What's the point of fragile, fleshy, fallen humanity?" But getting back to that bit about ordinary life: the film is very friendly to families as the reason superfolk do the cool stuff they do. (And messed-up families are the reason other superfolk do the bad stuff they do: the inhuman Ultron hates his all-too-human daddy, and a couple of orphans have it in for the guy who made them that way.) But "friendly to families" does not quite equal "family-friendly": there's a self-conscious upping of Adult Language and Themes. How else will you know to take seriously all the talk about Who We Are and What We Want From Life? Still, did we really need a "hide the zucchini" joke about the Hulk? (2015) — Matthew Lickona
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