Standard fare - but that's fine

Rating: 7/10 (15 April 2018)

If you're into the MCU, this is a solid offering. Interesting story, some good set pieces, new characters add to the dynamic without feeling intrusive, and it delivers on its title (despite necessarily pulling one or two punches for logic's sake). Does have a little too much of the recent tendency of feeling like an episode rather than a standalone film - it is independent enough to be enjoyable, and I understand this is sort of how the MCU works, but by this point there's so much going on you'd almost rather some of the threads were a little more self-contained. Nevertheless, aside from a few slightly over-convenient/inconvenient jumps in the storytelling (probably necessary given the runtime) it's actually impressively well crafted. It would have been easy for this to be a bit of mess, but it feels slick, and doesn't lose its way. Overall, nothing groundbreaking - difficult now that we can pretty much predict most of the characters' actions throughout - but it's a good solid effort, and worth a watch.