Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

Rating: 6/10 (20 January 2020)

Directed by Anthony Russo & Joe Russo. Starring Josh Brolin, Robert Downey Jr., Zoe Saldana, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pratt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Tom Holland, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Scarlett Johannson, Dave Bautista, Pom Klementieff, (voice) Bradley Cooper. (PG-13)
The first half of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's grand smackdown finds cosmic supervillain Thanos (Brolin) collecting infinity stones to give himself the ultimate power to wipe out half of the intelligent life in the universe. Depicting the efforts of some fifty or more characters across several storylines in both outer space and on Earth, this exhausting "event movie" is so relentless yet dramatically diffuse that it's difficult to engage with anything besides individual moments: a snappy quip here, a brief break from the fever pitch for reflection there. Requiring the absorption of about a dozen-and-a-half prior movies to be able to clearly follow what's happening, the effort lacks proper isolation, resulting in what feels like an incomplete film (and experience); it even opens with a mise-en-scÃ¨ne and ends on a cliffhanger. Despite two-and-a-half hours of action, most of the cast get only a few minutes of screen time to leave a mark (even major players from previous films, like Chadwick Boseman and Don Cheadle, don't manage much more than glorified cameos), but Brolin does manage to create a formidable yet conflicted--even humanized--enemy, which only makes his decisions more startling to behold. Has all the fingerprints of filmmaking-by-committee, but it should still satisfy most fans to at least some degree.
64/100