Overlong and far too busy

Rating: 5/10 (25 August 2019)

With a government agency putting restrictions on their actions The Avengers find themselves dividing into two teams. Team Captain America who go against what the agency say and continue as vigilantes and Team Iron Man whom work with the agency to uphold the law. However, a major political incident involving their old nemesis The Winter Soldier causes further strain amongst The Avengers. However, things aren't quite what they seem and a larger conspiracy soon begins to unravel...
As a franchise, Captain America has been far from perfect and not one of the three films has blown me away, but in my humble opinion I found this third film the weakest of the three...
The first thing that I need to address with this film is the length of it; it's simply TOO long and for what reason?? So that Marvel can introduce every single character in its entire existence. It actually got to the point where it started to become tedious when yet another character was introduced. What made it worse is that some characters appeared out of nowhere with no explanation as to who contacted them? Ant-Man just arrived in a van with no build-up and I'm pretty sure that Clint seemed to turn up out of nowhere as well. Iron Man at one point is unnerved by these 5 hydra agents hiding out in Russia and says he knows just the person who can help them and then gets Spider-man?? Don't get me wrong I like Spider-man as a super-hero, but how is he any more of a credible adversary than any of the other Avengers? At least in Justice League it made sense that they wanted Superman on-board as he's clearly much stronger than the other DC characters. It wouldn't have been so bad if the many introductions, political differences, squabbling and showdowns would have had much point, but the 5 Hydra Agents that are threatening the world don't even show up which in the end made the film something of a frustrating viewing experience.
The film does have some good points; for a start I did like the idea of The Avengers dividing into 2 teams; sort of bureaucrats vs vigilantes which kind of gives it a conflict within a conflict scenario. There are enough fight sequences scattered throughout the film to not make the unbearably long running time not be as much of a problem as it could have been.
Still despite this I couldn't warm to this third instalment in the franchise as much as I would have liked to; it just felt cluttered, unfocused and a little too busy for my liking. Perhaps being the third film in the franchise influenced the producers/writers decision to introduce the endless number of characters, but for me I found that this merely engulfed the film and didn't really allow the story to breathe. As it stands it's a passable effort, but for me its the weakest film in the trilogy.