Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Unnecessarily long at three hours, Endgame‘s grand space-opera does provide plenty of room for its top acting talent to show their wares in a surprisingly emotional and risk-taking finale to Marvel Studios’ ambitious Phase One.

Peppered with comic one-liners and emotional one-to-ones, Endgame manages to pull off a multi-threaded, timey-wimey, convoluted, three-act series of adventures concluding with the mother of epic battles in which the assembled Avengers (basically everybody from 21 marvel movies) manage to undo the damage of Infinity War. What, you thought Marvel would kill off the other half of it’s cash cows?

If the outcome is never in doubt, then the journey is about how the characters get there, with the focus on original Avengers Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye.

With Act One opening five years after the Snap which removed half the life in the universe, we see them all coming to terms with loss – through therapy, drink, work, vigilantism, and, surprisingly, family and fame.

Act Two is triggered by Ant Man’s return from the Quantum Realm to conceive the half-baked plot device of a Time Heist; go back, steal the Infinity Stones before Thanos can get them, undo the Snap. Simples.

Five stones, three teams, some emotional encounters with people from their pasts, a bit of self sacrifice, improvising when the plan goes adrift, and we’re on to the big set pieces for Act Three.

Endgame should buckle under the weight of all that Time Travel-ey hocus pocus, but in bamboozling us with all the holes in the branching reality, invites us just to go with it and admire the spectacle.

There isn’t a noticeable flaw in any of the three million years-worth of CGI rendering, the action is jaw-droppingly, off-the chart spectacular, inventive and precisely choreographed. You want thousands of aliens, flying piranha-slugs, spaceships, and Tessa Thompson’s Valykrie on a Pegasus, you got it. Brie Larson taking out Thanos’ mothership single handed? You kind of expect it.

Where Endgame scores is in the emotional core of the script and the ability of the actors to deliver on it; Endgame underpins the action with the familiar mantra, “it’s all about family, innit.” In any other genre, Evans, Hemsworth, Downey Jr., Johannsen, Renner would be up for multiple awards. Add to that Paul Rudd and Karen Gillan for their surprisingly sympathetic step-up from supporting characters and Endgame could pack the awards shelf (but won’t).

Josh Brolin doesn’t get the same material work work with after Infinity War, so is relegated to ho-hum mono-mania and big-time smash, bash and crash.

Everybody else comes back from the dead (except the ones that die on the Quest – sorry, Time Heist), and gets their little, or not so little cameo. So if you’re not invested in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe for the last fifteen years from Guardians to Doctor Strange, you’re going to struggle to keep up with who’s who and why you should care.

For the rest of us, you get to fist-pump, cheer, laugh and possibly cry as directors the Russo brothers hit every Disney play-book emotional note.

Endgame is a satisfying conclusion to a huge franchise behemoth; a bit like the coda to Wagner’s Ring Cycle or the seventeen epilogues of Return of the King. With a bunch of actors now out of contract, and newer characters in dollar-favour, the question is where next for the MCU? You can bet that with billion-dollar profits still in prospect, the super-hero genre isn’t about to die any time soon. RC

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Writers: Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely
Certification: PG/PG-13
Genre: Action & Adventure, Drama, Science Fiction & Fantasy
Running time: 182 minutes
Cast: Robert Downey Jr.,Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Paul Rudd, Brie Larson, Karen Gillan, Danai Gurira, Bradley Cooper, Josh Brolin, Winston Duke, Benedict Wong, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Holland, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, Chris Pratt, Tom Hiddleston, Evangeline Lilly, Tessa Thompson, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Robert Redford, Rene Russo, Michelle Pfieffer, Michael Douglas