Avengers: Endgame (2019)

(In Theatres, April 2019) The longest MCU movie may warrant the shortest review: It delivers on its promise to be a decent capstone to a 22-movie series. What else is there to say? Well, okay, maybe a bit more. Such as saying that Avengers: Endgame can’t be evaluated on the same kind of criteria as other films—it’s essentially incomprehensible without having seen its prequel, Infinity War, and unlocking most of its details would involve something like 10–20 previous films. As such, the expectations regarding the film are different, and the way it goes about fulfilling them is different as well. At a weighty three hours and change, it’s not surprising if it feels like four films smashed together. The first is a dour and surprisingly slow-paced exploration of a post-Snap world, deprived of half its population. It could have been a series, but the point here is to see the heroic figures of the series defeated, depressed and despondent. The next hour is somewhat more fun, as the MCU doubles upon itself to travel back in time and give fans some quality call-backs—it’s unequally interesting, but it does offer a few good moments. A gigantic 30-minute battle follows, with nearly the entire cast of the series so far back for an encore, a few crowd-pleasing bits and a few payoffs. Then we wrap things up with twenty minutes of various epilogues concluding the Thanos cycle in a rather satisfying (and in some cases, definitive) fashion. Not all of it is perfect—ask too many questions, and you won’t like the answers. But as a logistical exercise in trying to deliver as much payoff as possible to the fans, it’s really quite impressive. It’s not the end (obviously, since the MCU moneymaking machine is so profitable) but it’s an ending of sorts. Of course, the next question is whether the MCU can keep it up—it’s going to have to cultivate another batch of heroes, a new menace and yet keep some of its bewildering complexity in check as it goes harder on the complexities of its comic book origins, especially now that Disney owns the X-Men and Deadpool, and Sony is still trying to keep a spider-verse going. But what would an MCU film be without some meta-fictional content to keep up wondering?