AN EPIC MARVEL
It’s stupendously long and boasts more stars than you can shake Thor’s hammer at, but the Avengers grand finale is . . .
While it would be exaggerating the length of Avengers: endgame to say that i’ve had shorter holidays, it does tip the scales at more than three hours and could really do with an old-fashioned intermission.
On the other hand, nothing close to boredom ever sets in. Just a few bursts of cramp.
it is a wildly exhilarating, and at times genuinely poignant finale to the Avengers cycle of films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe; a suitable climax to 22 blockbusters that between them have generated more than $18 billion at the box office. Once you add on the value of merchandising, you have the kind of astronomical sum that an averagely paranoid country might spend on its entire defence budget. Over several years.
Not that any country’s defence system would last five minutes against Thanos, the genocidal maniac with a vast slab of corrugated jaw, brilliantly played by a heavily digitalised Josh Brolin.
By the end of last year’s Avengers: infinity War, he had out-muscled our team of superheroes and destroyed half the cosmos in the deluded conviction that he was doing a favour to the survivors by giving them more living space. Another genocidal maniac, Adolf hitler, called it ‘lebensraum’.
endgame sweeps us up more or less from the point at which infinity War set us down.
like last year’s film, it is directed by brothers Joe and Anthony Russo, from a script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely. So unsurprisingly, it has the same potent blend of spectacular action and lively wit.
A scene in which the demi-god Thor (Chris hemsworth) is found holed up in a Nordic- style fishing village in his Asgardian homeland, where he has run to fat and self-pity, is very funny. Rocket, the wisecracking racoon voiced by Bradley Cooper, is also a reliable source of comic relief. But there is a narrative to pursue here, too.
A caption winds us forward five years. The Avengers are scattered, beaten, demoralised, none more so than Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jnr), who has no use any more for his iron Man alter ego. Black
Widow (Scarlett arlett Johansson) is only slightly less subdued. subdued
hulk (Mark Ruffalo) is trapped between his human incarnation as Bruce Banner and his superhero form, and spends his time posing for selfies with child admirers.
Not even Captain America (Chris evans) has an answer. in short, Thanos has won, with the help of the six glowing infinity stones he needed to wreak havoc. So even with enthusiastic newcomer Captain Marvel (Brie larson) raring to go, how can the Avengers turn back the clock?
With a spot of nifty time travel, that’s how. Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) is already acquainted with the Quantum Realm, a kind of parallel universe, so if Stark, the gang’s technological genius, can work out how to whizz back in time just the right distance, maybe the infinity stones can be kept from Thanos’s giant grasp?
The trouble with messing with time is that it has a habit of messing ing with you back, Stark points out. out Conversely Conversely, it affords no end of opportunities to screenwriters.
There’s another terrific scene in which Stark finds himself in 1970, encountering his own father (John Slattery) and intriguing folk with his facial hair. There’s a puzzled Seventies discussion: is it a Bee Gees beard or a Mungo Jerry beard? But whizzing back and forth in time is not as easy and certainly not as concise as it sounds. especially given the need in this valedictory outing to bring together all the Avengers Avengers, accompanied by their back stories.
Some, like Doctor Strange ( Benedict Cumberbatch) and Spider-Man (Tom holland), make a much later entrance than others. And some make the ultimate exit, perishing in the fight against evil. For months, speculation has raged over which Avengers will be killed off. i’m offering no clues.
What i can report is that this film’s definitive battle makes most
of those that have gone before down the years look like minor skirmishes skirmishes.
It helps that Thanos is a properly three-dimensional villain; a thoughtful kind of guy, as genocidal lunatics go. In all his years of conquest, violence and slaughter, he muses, it was never personal. But Earth is a ‘stubborn, annoying little planet’. It’s personal now.
One of the main thrusts of the narrative in Infinity War concerned the dynamic between Thanos and his adopted daughters Gamora ( Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan), both of whom he’d stolen from their biological families, families the great big rotter rotter.
That storyline is resuscitated here, as indeed is Gamora, who finished Infinity War even greener than usual about the gills on account of being well and truly dead.
Which is another great advantage of the time-travel device; extinct characters can be brought back.
For those old enough to remember the TV series Dallas, it’s the Marvel equivalent of Pamela Ewing waking up from her year-long dream to find Bobby in the shower. Clearly, money was no object in the making of this movie. With so many hundreds of millions pumped into it, the special effects are duly dazzling, sometimes literally so. And heaven knows how much was set aside for the on-screen ‘talent’.
Quite aside from the superheroes themselves, pretty much every major star who’s ever had so much as a walk- on role in an Avengers film is wheeled out — Robert Redford, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Samuel L. Jackson — with the result that the closing credits read like the table plan at a Hollywood pro-celebrity golf tournament.
Still, if the whooping audience at the screening I attended is anything to go by, not to mention advance ticket sales that are already smashing records, it was money astutely spent.
Besides, the story needed an extravagant conclusion, for this is unequivocally, categorically, unambiguously, the end of the road for the Avengers as a turbocharged gang of vigilantes with a brief to save the universe from super-villainy.
Unless, of course, the men with fat cigars change their minds.