Avengers’ ultimate showdown
Superheroes band together in basic but busy plot
(6) AVENGERS INFINITY WAR. Directed by: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo. Starring: Robert Downey Jr, Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch. Reviewed by: Tim Robey.
AFTER the origin stories, the sequels sliding all over the quality spectrum, one Civil War ,a
Ragnarok, an Age of Ultron and a gazillion buckets of popcorn sold the world over, the Marvel Cinematic Universe ascends to a state of supernova in Avengers: Infinity War.
This is the one with every thus-far established Marvel champion thrown in for the hell of it: not just all the pre-existing Avengers but some freshly fledged reinforcements such as Chadwick Boseman’s Black Panther, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange and Tom Holland’s new Spider-Man.
If there were a Marvel superhero called Kitchen Sink he’d also be in it and not looking forward to the washing up.
In fact, not every possible character makes an appearance, but on this, as on the fates of the featured many, no more must be said: such is Marvel’s feisty war against spoilers.
For the original triumvirate – Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, to other jokes and memes fly around as frenetically as all the whizzy projectiles hurled down from distant planets.
Organisationally the movie has a struggle on its hands not to seem like the contents of a toy chest simply chucked down the stairs, with all the chaos of limbs and accessories that implies.
The villain, against whom every one of these galactic guardians is arrayed, is Josh Brolin’s Thanos, and he needs to be a huge, huge deal or the film can’t work: if this lot have handled anything remotely his equal before, there’s hardly the need for such an all-points call-up.
Lo and behold, he has fairly comprehensive plans for pulverising the known universe, using a gauntlet into which six different jewels known as Infinity Stones first need placing, each one distinctly enhancing his power in battle.
Close observers of Marvel lore will already know where every one of these coloured rocks is to be tracked down – one is embedded in the forehead of Vision (Paul Bettany).
Given the vast scale the Russos are working on, resorting to your typical collect-the-gems plot game seems disappointingly basic, but there’s a thornier problem with Thanos in general: he’s a huge hulk of a being, twice human size, but the effects job on Brolin thwarts his usual authority as an actor.
He can’t scan as a profound adversary, more like some outsize ogre-thug beamed in from World of Warcraft.
A subplot involving his adopted daughter Gamora (Zoë Saldana), whom he kidnaps away from her Guardians of the Galaxy cohorts, labours to give him depth, but you feel the effort and these are the stodgiest scenes.
Thank heavens, then, for his skull-faced wizardy sidekick, Ebony Maw (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), who drawls his dialogue with a campy British accent and glides around manipulating rubble with his unnerving fingers.
The movie could do with more of him.
The Russos are on much firmer ground pitting their good guys against each other – for comedy or friction – than pushing any of them up against Thanos.
Such is the profusion of lately added characters that plenty of them haven’t met yet, and these introductions are reliably good value: the best line in the film, just about, is simply Captain America saying his own name.
Death rears its head as something even Avengers might legitimately fear, but it says a lot about this film that one mid-ranking character actually dies twice, and the options for resurrection by the end are almost too multitudinous to get your head around.
One thing’s for sure: it leaves absolutely no doubt that
Avengers 4 is going to contain some serious avenging, even if it also hits control-Z on the shock-horror finale that will be the dominant talking point of this one.
Solving a problem like Thanos is clearly more than these heroes – or the Russos, quite – have managed in a single try. –