That’s my takeaway from the new extended TV spot for Avengers: Age of Ultron—they must be playing baseball. This spot features a lot of new footage, including Thor swinging for the fences using his hammer as the bat and Captain America’s shield as the ball. Easily the two coolest moments are when Thor grand-slams Cap’s shield and when Cap chucks his motorcycle into an oncoming truckload of bad guys. If at least one of those things doesn’t delight you, you’re dead inside. The rest of the footage is the kind of quippy dialogue that made The Avengers so fun—this time around the team spends a lot more time together so there’s a lot more snark.
We also get to hear, for the first time, one of the twins speak as Quicksilver debuts his Eastern European accent. Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch are our first non-American Avengers, hailing from the made-up country of Sokovia, and they both sport thick accents. The world of the Avengers is getting bigger, and one of the neat tricks that Age of Ultron pulls is escalating action simply by expanding outward. It’s hard to top the sheer scale of the action in The Avengers and Joss Whedon doesn’t even try, he just spreads it out across the globe. It works—the movie feels bigger without becoming a Transformers-style kinetic nightmare.
But amidst all the fun action and zingers, the shadow of Civil War spreads. Tony Stark’s opening comment about not being the boss is perfect, but it’s also maybe just a touch bitter. Steve Rogers is the leader of the Avengers but it isn’t in Tony Stark’s nature to not be in control. And therein lays the crux of the looming problem. For now, though, we can watch Thor and Cap play baseball while destroying an army of robots. IS IT MAY YET?
