Review of Avengers: Endgame (2019) by Paynebyname — 05 May 2019

Infinity War was a wonderful epic film yet this doesn't feel like it is written or directed by the same people.

They 'cleansed' Thor and Hulk of their toxic masculinity making them literally laughing stocks. From IW when Thor had an amazing journey, he is just embarrassing in this. And Hulk whose MO is losing his **** and smashing things up is suddenly all touchy feely - what the hell. It's almost like there is some kind of agenda in needing to clip the wings of the old guard before the next phase.

The time travel feels silly and gimmicky and nothing more than self indulgent fan service. They effectively ape IW by having the Avengers go on a stone search just like Thanos did in IW. It makes scenes such as that on Vormire have little or no tension because we saw it all in the other film.

Tony and Steve's arc doesn't get any decent closure with Tony reverting to the self absorbed douche bag that he was when the series started and Steve being his effective verbal whipping boy. All the efforts to make Thanos engaging and empathetic are cast aside so that the journey we saw him go on in IW is just thrown in the trash and we are given the 2014 Thanos who is just a cardboard cut out evil bad guy. This isn't the guy that we saw in IW who made the sacrifice on Vormire and could empathise with Scarlet Witch.

For no reason whatsoever, he has decided against his life goal of a 50% cull of the universe to complete annihilation of everything even though he hasn't had the opportunity to experience the 'fruits' of his cull. He is also now ridiculously over powered. In IW, Stormbreaker nearly kills Thanos when he has all six stones yet in Endgame, he has no stones or gauntlet and Thor can't mortally damage him with Stormbreaker AND Mjolnir.

I've seen many try to dismiss these as easily explainable plot holes but the reality is that they are just lazy writing and pretentious directing. Seemingly the makers got themselves into a hole with a fearsome yet sympathetic bad guy, cooked up a time travel device that created nothing but a slew of contradictions, removed the straight line linearity of IW, invested all the money in a final battle that looked like an over inflated DC mess rather than matching the clear and beautifully simple fights/battles from IW and felt the need to hobble some of the biggest characters to signal their social justice virtue.

This disappointment of a film which must rank as the Russo's worst MCU film smacks of what happened with Joss Whedon and the Ultron film. Too much pressure and studio meddling , straight jacketed by a dose of political correctness and a loss of stand out creativity to be patched over with fan pleasing guff.

Given the Russo's previous stellar work, I expected this to be sure fire hit but what I got was a hot mess of a film that tried to tie things up but rendered itself a little vanilla in doing so. What a wasted opportunity , what a sad end to what had been a glorious 10 years and what a disappointing follow on from the fabulous Infinity War.