It's the Endgame, Thank God

Rating: 5/10 (9 May 2019)

If a couple you know, having lived together for eleven years, decide to hold a huge wedding, spare no expense, and invite everyone they know, the net effect would be a lot like Avengers Endgame: several hours of your life you feel you'll never get back, and the one thing everyone agrees on is, thank god it's over.
I write this as someone who was a Marvel fan for a few years in the sixties, when these characters appeared only on the printed page. Then I forgot about the characters for thirty years, and came back to them when I had kids and we watched Marvel shows together: first the 1990s animated series, then the films beginning with the first X-Men in 2000.
From those first films, the Marvel franchise has been in the hands of skilled writers and directors who take the art seriously - very seriously. The current MCU, however, starting with 2008's Iron Man, peaked after a few years with the first two Captain America films, and 2012's The Avengers. After that, the seeming need to expand the universe led to increasingly messier films, making superstars out of all of its lead actors while squeezing them into less and less screen time; bit players in their own movies. Last year's Avengers: Infinity War, merging all existing Avengers with the intergalactic storylines of the Guardians of the Galaxy was bad enough, but Endgame outdoes it in terms of taking a modestly priced and scaled, mildly subversive art form (the comic book) and turning it into an extravagantly budgeted, exhausting mess (the Hollywood blockbuster).
The result is that although the climax of Endgame, bringing in almost every character who's appeared in the films since 2008, is pitched for thrills, the effect is the opposite. The return of all the heroes who disintegrated at the end of Infinity War is supposed to make us cheer, but it's as tiresome as the last drunken dinner speech at the aforementioned wedding. "Really? I was hoping I could go home. Can't anyone shut him up?"
The skills that go into these films are undeniable, but there seems to be a tipping point past which plotting this many characters becomes a matter of chance and luck. As the films grow from one super-hero against one-supervillain (Iron Man; Captain America the First Avenger) to two or three super-heroes against a larger force (Iron Man II; Captain America the Winter Soldier) to a veritable platoon of super-heroes against armies of robots/aliens/bad guys, the limits are passed. Even an expert like Joss Whedon couldn't stop Avengers: Age of Ultron from running out of steam like a badly timed fireworks display. Nevertheless, partly through their quality casts, the appeal of the films grows: like a dry spell in the episodes of a soap opera, the audiences keep watching because they've bonded with the characters and will stick with them, hoping that eventually the relationship will get better.
But a soap opera ain't the opera, and Endgame suffers from the blockbuster syndrome of giving the viewer too much of everything and not enough of anything. "Angry and wanting more" I think Pauline Kael called the Hollywood blockbuster, but in the case of Avengers: Endgame we can amend this to "angry and wanting less."