My son and I just returned from seeing Avengers: Endgame. My 14 year old son thought it was the best Marvel movie ever. Although I thoroughly enjoyed it, I think it belongs in the second tier below The Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor: Ragnarok.
To be honest, that means the creative team did something very right. This is a comic book franchise. It is not their job to please a 47 year old curmudgeon. My son and his friends should be the target audience. Suffice it to say, they definitely hit that target with the precision of Hawkeye himself.
Now for the tough part. How do I review the most easily spoiled movie ever without accidentally providing a huge spoiler? The answer is that I'm going to need to keep this vague and brief.
The movie had one job to do. It needed to tie up the previous 21 stories of the Marvel Cinematic Universe into one neat little bow. That is definitely a Hulk-sized task. I was surprised by the clever way they devised to perform this essential duty. It properly honored the heroes and events of the previous installments. It also managed to have the right amount of humor, heart and excitement. The only problem was it seemed those components were a bit disjointed. They were not all woven together as well as they had been in previous movies.
Although interesting, the first two hours do not have a significant amount of action. However, that does not mean it was boring. The writers made up for the lack of action with some nostalgic call backs to previous movies, a clever setup for how all these movies would be tied together, and humor... lots and lots of humor. The first two hours seems more like a humorous heist movie than a typical Marvel adventure. Although these two hours had several plot holes and seemed a bit of a mess, the anticipation of the finale was enough to hold everyone's interest.
If the movie ended after these two hours, I might have left the theater disappointed. Luckily for me (and all Marvel fans) it didn't. The last hour of the movie was one of the most thrilling things I have ever seen on screen. I have never been in a theater where there was so much cheering and fist pumping. Actually that is a lie. Back in the early 90s a movie theater/music venue in Chicago would play the Chicago Bulls playoff games on the movie screen. Because the theater also served beer (well before that became commonplace) you can imagine how much hooting and hollering there was. That is exactly how I felt for the last 60 minutes of this film (minus the euphoria of consuming 10 super cheap beers out of plastic cups). There was so much cheering that it honestly felt like a sporting event.
Instead of my typical "Geeky Dad's guide" let me just sum it up like this:
The final hour of pure awesomeness is worth sitting through the confusing and choppy first two hours. And because of the humor and cleverness, even that 2/3 of the movie was still enjoyable. Go see it in a quality theater ASAP. You will not be disappointed!
Oh and if you are 14 years old… IT IS THE GREATEST MOVIE IN THE HISTORY OF TIME!
