The plot is the main problem - big holes, silly reasons and cheap, cheesy tricks

Rating: 6/10 (27 December 2018)

I'm no fanboy, but I'm not a hater either. I've watched 15 or so of the MCU films and I've loved a few of them (Iron Man, Winter Soldier, Avengers Assemble, Civil War, Ragnarok) and at least enjoyed most of the rest.
The plot really is the problem here. The characters do stupid or out of character things just to move the film forward.
My biggest problem is the scene on Titan where Iron Man, Dr Strange, Spiderman, Star Lord, Drax & Mantis try to take the gauntlet from Thanos. Once Mantis has Thanos' mind subdued there was any number of ways in which they could have won the fight right there. In fact, they *were* winning the fight. They nearly had the gauntlet off (in the slowest, most difficult way possible ... why didn't they hack Thanos' arm off?) Instead, they bicker like children and Starlord slaps Thanos, breaking the mind control allowing Thanos to win and escape. This was so unsatisfying as to spoil the whole film for me.
I totally didn't buy Thanos' love for Gamora. That came out of nowhere and was just a cheesy plot device to elicit an emotional reaction from the audience. It also provided a framework to hang the recovery of the soul stone on, otherwise it would have been as exciting as a UPS delivery.
On the subject of Thanos, his motive for assembling the stones is lame. To snap his fingers and destory half of the beings in existence. For "balance". Wut? Ok, it makes a terrifying objective, but is very shallow.
Another recurring problem was the complete lack of logic in some of the fights. There's a basic problem of combining ordinary humans, albeit highly skilled and trained, with superhumans, be they gods, titans, aliens or whatever. Characters that were utterly outclassed inexplicably lasted more than a few seconds.
Black Widow against any of the Black Order should have only one outcome, very quicly. The Black Order wiped the floor with Scarlet Witch and Vision (who is powered by an Infinity Stone!) yet Black Widow doesn't die against them. Twice. BW is cool and all, but is just an un-augmented, highly skilled human. Sorry, nah. Also, that Black Order dude who wrapped Thor up in metal at the start gets killed cheesily by Iron Man blowing a hole in his spaceship. Nah, not buying that either. Thanos' power was theoretically increasing hand over fist (sorry) with every Infinity Stone he gained, but he won or lost fights throughout the film not based on how powerful he is but by whether or not the plot need a win or loss to move forward. Many other encounters in this logicless vein.
Cheesy deaths. You just know that most of the characters who died will come back. Therefore there is no gravitas to any of it. Cheap tricks.
It *was* visually spectacular and I thought the script was pretty good, where it wasn't labouring under ridiculous plotting. The action scenes were spectacularly good as usual, if wildly illogical at times.
Overall, not as satisfying as I wanted it to be. Like I say, i'm no fanboy but I was ready to love this film.