Avengers: Infinity War (12A)
Early on in Avengers: Infinity War a couple of key players in the Marvel Cinematic Universe find themselves watching news footage of an attack in New York while standing outside a fast-food joint in Edinburgh’s Cockburn Street. A sign in the background reads: “We will deep-fry your kebab”. If this sounds like a stereotypical (if innocuous) way of signifying the film’s arrival in Scotland, it’s also an oddly appropriate gag for this film. The 19th movie in the nowdecade old MCU is high-calorie blockbuster filmmaking, stuffed to the gills with neighbourhooddestroying chaos and so many above-the-title movie stars you could burn through the word count of a review just listing them. But even with a running time of 158 minutes that only takes us to the half-way point of this concluding two-part instalment, this isn’t some lumbering beast of a movie ready to keel over from the weight of everything it’s trying to do. It’s surprisingly fleet-footed, with the Edinburgh sequence somewhat typical of the film’s early action set-pieces. Using the gothic architecture of the Old Town as a soon-to-be-blown-up hideout for Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch and Paul Bettany’s Vision – whose head contains one of the infinity stones being sought by the film’s villain Thanos (Josh Brolin) – directors Joe and Anthony Russo orchestrate a destruction-heavy fight across the rooftops of the Royal Mile before a rogue faction of the now disassembled Avengers – a bearded Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a blonde Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), a wise-cracking Falcon (Anthony Mackie) – crash through Waverley Station. Elsewhere we’re reintroduced to various key players (Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Spiderman, Doctor Strange, Thor, various Guardians of the Galaxy) as the film sets up different tag-teams to tackle the impending threat from the snowplough-faced Thanos. He’s on a deranged mission to bring balance to the universe by purging it of half its inhabitants and the film isn’t messing around in this respect. But for all the blockbuster spectacle on display, the film ends up in a place that’s unexpectedly poetic and poignant, proving that even a movie of this size still has the ability to surprise.