Too much going on for too little payoff

Rating: 7/10 (26 April 2018)

This was an ambitious film. Capping off 10 years of Marvel superhero films. In a nutshell, it confirmed my impression that Marvel are at their best when they focus a film on an individual hero or group of heroes (such as Black Panther or Guardians of the Galaxy). The crossover films tend to suffer from the story being spread too thinly over several story arcs and this film was yet another example of that.
The good. Visual effects were the usual high standard we expect from these films. It's an amazing spectacle. The action sequences were also superb as we've come to expect. What Marvel have always done well, they continued to do well here. Cheeky humour was used in good doses, mostly at appropriate moments (as opposed to the grossly overused and often inappropriately timed humour in Thor Ragnarok).
The bad. There were many corny, predictable moments in this film. For the most part, Marvel were playing it pretty safe. Early in the movie there were a couple of moments where a character appeared without clearly showing who it was, leaving the audience guessing for a few seconds. Would it be Iron man? Captain Americal etc. A little tease before the full reveal. That was cool the first few times. It got old pretty quick, however, by the time they'd used that trick 7 or 8 different times. My overall impression of the first half of the movie was plenty of action. But too much happening with too many characters in too many places. The rapid switching from one location / group of characters to another was often jarring and made it difficult to really care about some of the character arcs and sub plots that were clearly meant to be pretty important. It seemed to lack continuity, flow, whatever you would call it.
The last half of the movie was where Marvel became less predictable and defied expectations. Normally I'd say that's a good thing. Honestly though, I hated the ending. Without spoiling anything, I'd say it left me feeling highly unsatisfied after what was generally a very enjoyable film. Usually I stick around for the post credits scene to enjoy the nice little extra they throw in. This time I stuck around hoping it would improve the ending. It didn't. It seemed a lot of build up to... nothing? I'm sure it was meant to be a bit of a cliff hanger to get us excited for the next Marvel film and I'm sure it's an ending that would appeal to hardcore comic fans. As a casual marvel movie fan though, it left me feeling very flat and overall disappointed with which was otherwise a pretty solid film