Spoiler-filled Review of Avengers Endgame

As the title suggests, this review contains many a spoiler for Avengers Endgame

The Good

• The Nebula/ Stark relationship. Bloody hell, I never knew I needed that pairing. I loved that it showed how much both of them had grown. Tony shows a lot more patience than he did for Peter (sob) and Nebula is … well, the fact that she’s not killing him is amazing. His ‘you’ve won’, her joy at winning and her insisting he eats made my heart ache. There’s the added bonus of giving her a Beatles inspired nickname!

• Time travel!! So much good from this. The references, the Easter eggs. Basically, it’s this that gives Endgame the Bad Wolf feel. It’s not flawless by any means, but I’m not going to complain. Not in this section anyway. It allows the middle act to be a ‘greatest hits’ of the last decade.

• Captain America; swearing, fighting and passing the torch. Everything about the end of his story arc is awesome. It’s a fitting bow out and a kind way to ‘kill’ Steve Rogers.

• ‘Hail Hydra’ was the best Easter egg that gained a whoop from the audience and brought me more joy than the swears. Cap wielding Mjölnir is something fans have been waiting for since Age of Ultron’s post party worthiness test.

• Tony Stark has some brilliant moments in this film. His story literally couldn’t have been written, or acted, and better.

• The cameos are brilliant, the best being René Russo’s reprisal as Thor’s mother and John Slattery as Howard Stark. Anyone who has lost a parent will know how much they wish for moments both Stark and Thor get. They’re tender scenes, with the right balance of humour thrown in.

• Peter Parker and his beautiful and oh so god damn polite ways. In the middle of battle, he still finds time to introduce himself to Captain Marvel.

• ‘We’ve got her covered.’ It’s fair to say that this is still very much a ‘boy’s club’ film (on screen, our female characters are relatively isolated from each other), but there is one moment in which the film does give the audience a wonderful sisterhood. It gave me goosebumps and tears of joy. THESE. WOMEN. CAN.

The Bad

• Time travel. I’m still a little unsure about how it all works and why killing baby Thanos wouldn’t be the best plan. It’s timey whimey nonsense. If you don’t think about it too long, all is good.

• What happened to Goose?! Come on, he ATE one of those stones for safe keeping. He’s invested.

• While I loved the scene dealing with the soul stone and I wouldn’t have expected anything less, I don’t know what to make of Nat’s death. One, either it’s really shit because she’ll escape death when it comes to her solo outing. Or, as sources have informed me, we’re getting a movie that predates phases one and two; which is also shit (unless, at a push, it’s the infamous Budapest assignment), as she will never be in any danger. Plus, you’ve wrapped up the Thanos saga… don’t fuck about with the timeline. Leave it, move forward. The final thing I don’t get, it was a trade: soul for soul. Steve gave it back; quid pro quo dear Red Skull.

• It’s no one’s fault as I don’t think anyone would have predicted the juggernaut this franchise was going to be. Imagine if they had the foresight and was able to drop hints to some of the time travel and stone switches. It would have been glorious.

• Did the stones come with a user manual?! Did it include some form of ‘clap on, clap off’ technology? How did they know a click of the finger would bring people back? How did Tony know his finger snap would dust all the bad guys? Why was it a finger snap and not Death-Starring the whole glove up the user’s arse?! (Come on, if it was Deadpool, you know that would have been a thing)

• There were a few instances in which the CGI just wasn’t up to its usual standard. While this is a spoiler review; I’m not going to pinpoint these as they are the sort of thing that you might not notice the first time unless it’s pointed out.

The Ugly

• Captain Marvel. I mean what the actual fuck?! You’ve set up one of the best female heroes in cinematic history and you reduce her to a plot device?! We need Tony back on Earth in the first third (firstly, do you really?!), we’ll use Captain Marvel to give the oxygen deprived ship a piggy back. You need the stones taken to the end field and all your players are tagged out; use Captain Marvel (side bar: this should have been Black Widow, the first female Avenger and nice symmetry to Infinity War).

• Captain Marvel doesn’t have an emotional stake in the proceedings because we don’t see her fight and the one person who called her to arms has zero interaction with her. ZERO! In fact, despite fans being informed that her namesake film is not required viewing to watch Endgame, I’m not sure people would make the connection between the Infinity War pager credit sequence and the Swiss Army knife of superheroes.

• Errrr, Fury and Agent Hill didn’t join fight? Neither has a line of dialogue! Nope! That is so many levels of wrong.

• What the FUCK happened to Loki?! He’s got the tesseract after Hulk’s hissy over the stairs is thwarted and snides off like the snake he is. But, and this is timey whimey again, Tony and Steve go further back and steal it, preventing Battle of New York from happening unaware of Bruce’s promise. When they’re returned, the battle still happens… so did Cap stop off and find Loki?!

• Hulk/Banner hybrid! What and why? There wasn’t a resolution to his Erect-o-Hulk dysfunction. I get that it’s about him finding a balance; but he’s been reduced to such a ridiculous caricature that I’d have rather had Howard the fucking Duck in his place. Everything that made him the best Banner/Hulk in Assemble has been fucked off in much the same way Luke tossed the sabre in Last Jedi.

Misc Question

• What the hell happened to Agent 13? Just because she was dropped as the Cap’s romantic interest doesn’t mean she couldn’t make an appearance, right?