Huge mess, nothing like Infinity War, complete opposite

Rating: 4/10 (26 April 2019)

Infinity war was very good, had solid direction, acting from Brolin, and many genuinely moving moments. There was also plenty of comedy, but also plenty of awesome scenes, mainly involving Thor. There was also lots of great character moments.
Endgame ruins everything from Infinity war from the opening bell. It seems they have forgotten how to make movies. The direction and acting is awful, attempting to be serious and have drama, but failing miserably. On almost every technical category I would give this movie a C, direction, acting, editing, score, cinematography, etc.
The battle scenes are just so awful, boring, ugly, lacking an weight, or pace, or anything. The only American director I have seen pull off large battles well is Mel Gibson in The Patriot, We Were Soldiers, and Hacksaw Ridge.
The central plot of this movie is a huge derivative mess, with the plot to get the infinity stones to bring people back lifted whole cloth from Dragon Ball Z (gather those dragon balls and make a wish), and the time travel... Where to begin.
The time travel plot they attempt to be clever by saying time travel doesn't work this way or that, but then go on to make a huge mess of any kind of logic or consistency. They basically just use multiverse theory (ala dragon ball) but then have huge holes throughout. Having seen quite a few excellent takes on time travel, this has to be the most lazy.
Speaking of time travel, that whole section of the movie is just a huge waste of time revisiting the events of past movies, which I see what they were attempting, but just because you have lofty reasons in your head for doing something doesn't make it any less of a poor decision. They thought they were being poetic by heavy handily reminding the audience of the past and tying it together, but that is the most brute force way you could possibly tie the past to the future, by having the characters go back there. Was there nostalgia? Was there warm feelings of seeing those things again? honestly not for me. I don't work like that. I just saw the heavy handedness of it, and it turned me off.
As far as characters go, no one here was used well, and none of the characters had time to really do anything. I was so impressed by how so many characters were handled so well in Infinity War, but this was the complete opposite. Then characters were outright destroyed, Thor, Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, actually I will stop because I realized they actually ruined all that I can think of, except perhaps for Ant-man. Almost no one here was their character, every single one just about was the same, a cynical, cruel, angry, bad person. Just genuinely bad people, virtue less, nothing good. There was no heroism, none of the good qualities that make you like being around people. I didn't want to spend one minute more with these people.
So to sum it up, this is a bad movie in execution and fundamental story telling. It also fails me personally because I go to a movie about heroes to see heroes, flawed, but with some shred of goodness that makes me like them. No one in this movie is likeable. Maybe Ant-man comes through unscathed.