A Marvel-ous way to bow out...
Amazingly, it’s only 11 years since a motor-mouthed Robert Downey Jr took on the part of Iron Man and almost overnight transformed our cinematic appetite for Marvel superheroes. Suddenly they could be cool and funny as well as all-powerful.
Crucially, they became so just as digital visual effects finally caught up with what the old comic-book artists could hint at but only our imaginations could complete. Now, an astonishing 21 films later, it all comes to an end with Avengers: Endgame.
It’s not quite perfect – there’s a long section in the middle where we’re jumping back and forth in Avengers time that is very much for hard-core fans only – but my goodness it brings this particular franchise arc to a quite brilliant and highly emotional close. Assuming, of course, that you like this sort of thing in the first place.
For the past year or so, Marvel films has been ending with chilling end-credit sequences in which characters suddenly disappear, floating away in a cloud of ashy dust. The explanation came
Avengers: Endgame Cert:12A 3hrs ★★★★★
in Avengers: Infinity War and is reprised here in a bravely downbeat opening that not only seizes our attention but reminds us why we’re here.
The all-powerful Thanos – superbly played by a much-modified Josh Brolin – now in possession of all six destiny-defining infinity stones, has carried through on his threat to wipe out 50% of all living creatures in the universe – superheroes and all. So it’s a depleted team who are left to work out what they can do about it: Iron Man (Downey Jr), Captain America (Chris Evans), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and, oh yes, Nebula (Karen Gillan), the cyborg who, as we get properly under way, seems to be the only surviving crossover from the hitherto separate Guardians Of The Galaxy franchise. In due course, Ant Man joins the team, his presence not only proving pivotal in terms of plot advancement and quasi-quantum physics but, because he’s played by the amiable and reliably funny Paul Rudd, ensuring the comedy quotient stays high too. This is a big, epic, franchiseclosing picture but directors Anthony and Joe Russo know the importance of allowing it to laugh both at itself and, indeed, at some of its iconic sci-fi predecessors. Back To The Future comes in for a particularly hard but very funny time. With flashbacks and other creative devices reintroducing us to some old faces – some familiar, some less so – it’s clear that harnessing such a big number of characters was never going to be easy. There’s a lovely moment when the big-baddie-of-themoment is confronted with yet
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‘This is the superhero film that serves up pretty much everything’
another, inevitably avenging superhero and merely shrugs and says: ‘I don’t even know who you are.’ More than once I knew how he felt.
The emotional range of the film is huge – from Hemsworth playing it for laughs as a boozy, paunchy, disillusionedThorto touching scenes when pasts are revisited, lost loves rekindled, family bonds renewed. I hope I give nothing away when I say that, even if you’ve only bought halfway into the whole Marvel superhero thing, you might want to bring tissues.
With Brie Larson whizzing in and out of the action as Captain Marvel, it’s good to see the female side of the superhero universe getting a decent, sisters-together share of the action. But then this is the superhero film – the mother of all superhero films, if you like – that serves up pretty much everything, including a marathon, three-hour running time.
But if, like me, you’ve seen all 21 films that precede it, you won’t begrudge it a single second. Definitely worth assembling for.