A couple years back, Marvel released an animated straight-to-DVD movie Ultimate Avengers, based somewhat on the popular Ultimates comic. Softening the hard series put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths, but it did have some stuff going for it. It had that great Avengers vs. Hulk fight at the end and a sweet scene where Captain America realizes just which century he’s woken up in. All in all, it wasn’t so good.
A sequel came out soon after, featuring Black Panther. I remember very little of it due to how boring it was. The highlight of it being a fun segment where Tony Stark takes a walk through his cave of infinite Iron Man armors to settle on the War Machine design.
As much as I didn’t like Ultimate Avengers 2, that doesn’t compare to the outright disgust I had at Invincible Iron Man. Holy shit. That movie is so boring that, no joke, hermanos fell asleep watching it TWICE. It’s made up of endless talking, bad CGI, lots and lots of Iron Man getting his ass handed to him and a laughable climactic battle involving the Mandarin’s ghost floating over a mind-controlled naked woman who’s defeated by Iron Man yelling “REMEMBER WHO YOU ARE!” It’s really bad. I feel sorry for anyone who purchased it based on the success of the Robert Downey Jr. movie.
Following that came Doctor Strange. This one had promise. As an origin for Strange, it went really well. The character development was tops. Too bad they decided to bog it down with so many unneeded things. They decided that magic wasn’t interesting enough, so they transferred nearly everything magic-related into kung-fu sword fighting. Then they gave Strange a squad of kung-fu action sorcerers for the sake of a body count. It would have been pretty good, ultimately, until they ruined it with the most laughable deus ex machina in movie history. The way Dr. Strange beats Dormammu is so badly written and lazy, I’m still in awe.
My personal order is Doctor Strange over Ultimate Avengers over Ultimate Avengers 2 over Invincible Iron Man. The new animated movie Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow steps over that list as the best. But does that mean it’s actually good? That’s a good question.
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