Genre Adventure

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Item: Avengers: Endgame
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — Avengers: Endgame (2019)

By the spring of 2019, Marvel Studios had spent eleven years and twenty-one films building what it called the Marvel Cinematic Universe, a connected franchise experiment on a scale Hollywood had never seriously attempted before. Avengers: Infinity War ended on a genuinely shocking note, and Endgame was positioned as the direct continuation and conclusion of that story, the film the whole sprawling project had supposedly been pointing towards. Whatever your feelings about the MCU as a creative endeavour, the cultural weight behind this release was real. It broke box office records worldwide within days of opening, and for a significant portion of the cinema-going public it was treated less like a film and more like a communal event, something to be experienced rather than simply watched.

The Russo brothers, Joe and Anthony, had by this point become the franchise's most trusted pair of hands for large-scale ensemble work. Their earlier entry in the series, Captain America: Civil War, had already shown a capacity for juggling a crowded cast while keeping some emotional throughline intact. Endgame handed them an even bigger brief: a runtime of just over three hours, a cast of dozens, and the task of providing closure to story threads that had been running since 2008. The screenplay was written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, the same writers responsible for Infinity War, and the production was, by any measure, enormous in scope and budget.

The principal cast returning here reads like a roll call of franchise regulars. Robert Downey Jr., who had been the commercial and emotional anchor of the MCU since the very beginning, features prominently alongside Chris Evans, whose Steve Rogers arc had been one of the more consistent character journeys across the series. Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, and Scarlett Johansson all reprise their roles as the remaining Avengers left standing after the events of Infinity War, each given their own share of the narrative weight. Downey Jr. in particular had become so thoroughly identified with Tony Stark over more than a decade that it is genuinely difficult to think of the MCU without him. If you want a sense of where that character began, my earlier look at Iron Man 3 covers some of that ground. For contrast, and to see how the series handled a previous large ensemble piece, the Avengers: Age of Ultron review is worth a read as well.

Three hours of fan service, nostalgia loops, and CGI spectacle and yet, somehow, it all feels oddly flat. Endgame was meant to be the culmination of over a decade of storytelling, the emotional and narrative payoff to a billion-dollar experiment in long-form cinema. Instead, it often plays like a checklist of greatest hits, ticking off returns, reunions, and last stands without much genuine feeling behind them. The time heist in the middle is little more than a bloated, self-indulgent rerun of past glories, complete with winks, cameos, and callbacks that serve memory, not meaning. The film starts with promise (the aftermath of the snap, the grief, the helplessness) and there are fleeting moments of real emotion, particularly with Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. But too much of it is drowned out by noise, fan-pleasing theatrics, and a final act that drags on for what feels like an eternity. The battlefield at the end, packed with every Marvel character ever, is visually overwhelming but dramatically inert. It’s not tension, it’s fanfiction logic, where quantity replaces quality and “everyone shows up” is mistaken for catharsis. And let’s be honest: it’s boring. Long stretches go nowhere, the stakes are artificially inflated, and the script leans so heavily on what’s come before that it forgets to build anything new. It’s not brave, not inventive, not even particularly smart. It’s a machine designed to make money and make fans cheer, not to tell a story with heart or honesty. Yes, it’s technically polished. Yes, it’s a cultural moment. But as a film? It’s overlong, emotionally hollow, and ultimately forgettable beneath the fireworks. Boring twaddle wrapped in a superhero cape.

So where does that leave us? I went in wanting to be wrong, wanting the weight of all those films to coalesce into something genuinely moving. There are seconds, not even minutes, where it almost gets there. But a film that runs for three hours cannot survive on seconds. The honest truth is that I sat in that cinema seat feeling progressively less engaged rather than more, which is a fairly damning thing to admit about a film designed, above all else, to make you feel something. The machine worked well enough to fill seats and generate conversation, and I understand why so many people love it. For me, though, the noise was always louder than the story. Boring twaddle indeed, just with a very expensive cape.

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

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Avengers: Endgame (2019) on YouTube

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

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

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