review: Avengers Endgame

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR AND AVENGERS: ENDGAME

And so it all comes down to this. After 21 films over a span of 11 years, the aptly titled Avengers: Endgame seeks to wrap up nearly two dozen storylines in just a shade over three hours. Three hours is a long run time, but that's also a lot of material to squeeze in.

The previous film was daring in its premise: Superhero movies are typically feel-good action stories, but Avengers: Infinity War ended not only with the heroes losing, but losing big. That was a bold move. Endgame sorta goes back to playing it safe.

The beginning of Endgame is as dark and depressing as the end of Infinity War, with Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.) facing "certain" death, and the other survivors of the Infinity War dealing with the devastating loss of millions of people, including many key characters of the Marvel Universe. But when Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) escapes from the Quantum Realm, where everything, including time, is pliable, he introduces a new possibility: What about going back in time, grabbing the Infinity Stones before Thanos can get them, coming back to the present, and using them to defeat Thanos?

And that's what leads to, what was in my mind, the weakest sequences in the film, in which the characters go back in time to previous events depicted in earlier movies. The whole thing felt like braggadocio, of Marvel bragging, "hey, remember this great moment, wasn't that great, wasn't that cool? Well here's another one!"

Some nitpicks: The youthening effects on Michael Douglas and other actors whose characters' younger selves made cameos. This was terrible. And Robert Redford's cameo: This is how he wants to end his career, with a pointless cameo, after his tailor-made swan song in The Old Man and the Gun?

But all of that said, damn does Marvel do some things better than anyone else. Juggling an enormous number of characters, giving each of them great character moments, with an ensemble film bigger than some entire TV series. And as for the big dramatic moments: Marvel has always done great action scenes, and it doesn't disappoint here. But Marvel has also always done something fairly unique: knowing when to take a dramatic pause, knowing that if it's built up properly, and presented well, a pause can be as powerful, if not more powerful, than all the fireworks up there on the screen. Well done, Marvel. Well done.