Empty calories.

Rating: 6/10 (1 May 2019)

Like most of the MCU, this film hits its highs. Snappy dialogue, likable characters, has some heart, laughs aplenty, huge cast, pop-culture references galore. You go see it and you enjoy yourself. But by the time you make it from your theater seat to your car, it's already started wearing off. This is much of my gripe with MCU films as a whole and much of my gripe with Endgame.
I enjoyed the film. Like I said, fun. In the way that eating cotton candy is fun but leads to stomach pain minutes after you're done. Endgame suffers from too much fan-service at best and at worst is flat-out dumb and doesn't make sense.
The Highs:
There's real heart here. The scenes with fathers and daughters got me in the feels. The Hawkeye opening with his family was really well-done. The Tony Stark daughter stuff was nice. I appreciated the opening third for giving in to the dark ending of the last film. I loved Fat Thor. And I thought the ending, though expected, was well executed.
The Lows:
The middle chapter is a mess. I mean, a real mess. The time-traveling plot is so nonsensical that at one point they literally start rattling off other time-travel movies that don't make sense to excuse themselves. One of the lovable things about the MCU is it doesn't take itself too seriously, but this feels like a bridge too far. It literally doesn't make sense that they can change somethings and not others, and it's convoluted and it involves battery packs.
The CGI overload gets tiresome. There are entire scenes where no one real is even on screen. You have giant purple Josh Brolin with a scrotum chin talking to blue lady with a mix of 6'8" Voldemort at Power Forward. I like some of this, but over-reliance on it feels too artificial and video-game like.
The film tries to fit way too much in, such as the dark Hawkeye plotline that is referred to but mostly happens offscreen until one 2-minute fight. We didn't need to see that.
While the device of literally traveling back through previous movies has a nostalgic touch, is that the best way to really wrap up the story? Or should we blaze a new trail here?
Overall, the whole snap felt contrived, knowing that all the characters would come back and that the only one who would die were Cap and Iron Man, largely because the actors' contracts are up. We talked at the office about this going in and said Iron Man would die and Cap would likely go back to the '40s. So where's the surprising storytelling here?
This is fun, entertaining popcorn fare, but it has zero depth and nothing truly fresh to offer.
If you're reading this in the 2020s you probably agree this film doesn't hold up at all.
Or you've gotten your hands on one of those magic Duracells.