Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Let me tell you the moment Avengers: Endgame lost me. It's the final battle, every Marvel character who has ever drawn breath crammed onto one screen, capes and cloaks and hammers and whatever-the-hell flying in every direction. It looks extraordinary. It feels like absolutely nothing. That's the problem with this film in a nutshell: it's mistaking volume for emotion, and presence for payoff.

This was supposed to be it. The culmination of over a decade of storytelling, the moment where all those threads pull tight and mean something. And to be fair, it starts with genuine promise. The aftermath of the snap is handled with real weight. The grief, the failure, the hollow quiet of a world that lost half its people. For a short while, Endgame feels brave enough to sit in the wreckage rather than sprint away from it. Tony Stark and Steve Rogers both get moments in that space that actually land. I felt something. I was willing to go wherever the film wanted to take me.

Then the time heist kicks in, and the whole thing starts curdling.

What should be a propulsive, inventive second act becomes a bloated victory lap through the Marvel back catalogue. Cameos, callbacks, winks to camera. It's fan service dressed up as plot, and it's self-indulgent in a way that stops the story dead. The film keeps nudging you in the ribs: remember this? remember that? Rather than building something new, it rummages through the attic and expects you to weep at the smell of old boxes. I wanted to feel moved. Instead I felt like I was watching a clip show.

Now, I'll be honest, I've had a complicated relationship with this franchise. I thought Avengers: Infinity War was a genuinely better piece of filmmaking: tighter, nastier, willing to let its villain actually win. Endgame doesn't have that courage. It's too invested in making everyone feel good to take any real risks. The script leans so heavily on what came before that it forgets to build anything of its own. There's nothing here as propulsive as the airport sequence in Captain America: Civil War, nothing that feels truly alive and dangerous.

And then the final act. Lord, the final act. It drags on for what feels like an entire separate film, spectacle piled on spectacle until the whole thing collapses under its own weight. "Everyone shows up" is not catharsis. It's fanfiction logic. The stakes feel artificially inflated precisely because nothing is allowed to stay lost, nothing is allowed to cost anything that the audience wouldn't accept. Three hours is a long time to spend watching a machine perform the function it was built to perform.

Because that's what Endgame is, really. A machine. Technically polished, culturally enormous, professionally assembled. I'm not going to pretend it isn't slick, because it is. But slick isn't the same as good. The script isn't brave. It isn't inventive. It isn't even particularly smart. It's designed to make you cheer at the right moments and cry at the cued ones and then walk out feeling like you got your money's worth. For a lot of people, it worked. I understand why. But sitting there in the dark, I felt the mechanism grinding beneath every scene.

The moments of genuine emotion, and there are a handful, get drowned in noise before they can breathe. There are long stretches that go absolutely nowhere. And the whole thing, beneath the fireworks and the enormous cast and the decades of goodwill it's drawing on, is oddly hollow.

Two and a half stars. Boring twaddle wrapped in a superhero cape, and no amount of fan-pleasing theatrics could convince me otherwise.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2019  | Watched: 2025-07-30

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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More from Joe Russo: Captain America: Civil War (2016) · Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
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