downbeat, overblown & so so long. Cuts all your favourite characters down to size

Rating: 3/10 (3 August 2019)

Maybe I would have enjoyed this more if I were a real Marvel fanboy, although from reading the other reviews I might well have cause to doub that, but as someone coming to this film through all the hype, and the knowledge that this has just outgrossed Avatar in terms of the box office I am simply astonished how lacklustre this film is.
Sometimes I dislike a film, and rail against it while secretly having quite enjoyed it, the objection being to some aspect of the film which annoyed me, maybe something ideological or political. But despite Marvel increasingly taking a political line on many things there is really very little in this film - at least on the surface - that one could find objectionable about it. In many ways in fact it is very routine and unobjectionable. But problem mainly relates to the film's obesity & overblown nature combined with a manufactured self-indulgence that was just annoying to watch.
With respect to the latter this is mainly with reference to the final battle (where everyone who's anyone in the Marvel Universe makes an appearance) and the tying up of things in the post-coital glow: I get that this has been a long, epic and much loved journey for many film-goers, and also that fans will want a proper send-off etc for their favourites, but unfortunately this is done really badly, & inconceivably in an abrupt & unsatisfactory way, something that is hard to account for given the massive length of a movie that unfortunately in every other respect never ceased to feel slow and lumbering.
In this regard we get some major goodbyes at the end with respect to characters who in this film at least we have seen for a matter of seconds. Essentially making any sense of this requires us to reference the history of these films, something which is simply bad & indulgent writing.
The massive assembly of characters, particularly at the end, is supposed to be one of the pulls of the film, but instead it serves to make their appearance superficial and works to diminish them as individuals. Just imagine meeting your favourite Marvel comic book hero in real life: well, by the end of this film that actually sounds like a rather dull prospect: the overblown nature of the wrap-up diminishes everyone. Bringing them all together simply works to cancel out teir uniqueness & makes their fantastic and in their own right typically overblown powers (Captain Marvel especially) seem prosaic in juxtaposition with each other.
But a bit of indulgence could be forgiven if the story was worth anything much. Unfortunately compared to Infinity, there's really very little to it. The time travel aspect to it was too referential with respect to other movies (self-referentiality hasn't really worked well since the Scream movies). Sometimes with these types of movies you get fans duking it out on account of whether an idea is plausible or not. Maybe that has been happening but if so I'd be surprised; the narrative device never seems to be taken particularly seriously & for that reason it's difficult for the audience to take it very seriously: the time travel aspect is simply what needs to happen in order to sort the situation out & the writers simply come up with necessary justificiation & a few quips to let us know that they know we've seen it all before a hundred times.
A part of the problem here is that the character motivations while there on paper never really felt that real. Renner's character was perhaps the most convincing in describing the bleakness of the post-Infinity world, but it never really seemed quite enough. Half the universe wiped out - something worse than the Black Death or Mongol destruction at its worth - but it never seems like that big a deal. A tighter script, maybe focussed more on an aggrieved Renner or equivalent might have made it seem real & genuinely high stakes.
Beyond that there was very little in the movie that was simply enjoyable, in the switch off your mind & enjoy the ride variety. Thor has already been emasculated - he is simply a fat slob, & for reasons presumably relating to the next Thor film - he never recovers except to discover some meaningless cliche about being himself instead of who he should be. Nebula although good, has too much screen time. Downey's Iron Man is never his old self at any time. Peter Parker's ok but not present for much of the movie & superfluous to the plot. Captain Marvel is basically Superman but with unpleasant attitude instead of character & functions entirely as a deus ex machine - a narrative device pretty much synonymous with copping out & failing as a writer.
The only two characters who have a likeable part in the film pretty much are Antman, who gets a surprisingly large part in this movie, & the Hulk, whose initial appearance as a composite of Bruce Banner & the Hulk himself is actually genuinly intriguing for a short time. Unfortunately even this latter innovation works to diminish the character in the final battle where we don't even have the pleasure of seeing the Hulk properly smash everything up. Ultimately what is the point of a Hulk who is fully in control of himself?
This is just a bad overblown movie that seems to take pleasure in down-sizing it's heroes in anticipation of a new greatly diminished future