It’s past 1 a.m. on a Friday morning and the Lincoln Center Theater is roaring with life. Every theater is playing “Avengers: Endgame.” There is an excited energy in the air and every single seat for every showing is filled. Anxiously threading through the crowded concession lines are patrons literally sprinting to the bathrooms to not miss a single beat of the three-hour movie that’s going to make more than a billion dollars. The wait is finally over to find out what happens in our 10-year journey in this iteration of the Marvel Universe.
Thankfully for devoted fans and everyone else, “Avengers: Endgame” is a beautifully crafted capstone.
Last we saw, Thanos had dusted half of the universe’s population. The Avengers, diminished in half and burdened with the colossal weight of failure, are left to pick up the pieces of the greatest atrocity the cosmos has ever known. I’ll avoid spoilers, but as predictable as the movie was at a 40,000-foot level (we knew at least Spider-Man had to come back, as Marvel already released the trailer for “Spider-Man: Far From Home”), the method and storyline complexity renders an elegant and complex emotional and action-packed film for viewers.
Every player and nearly every major plot point from most of the Marvel Universe films plays a role in the finale. There are cameos galore. There is lots of fan service — comic book folks will be thrilled.
“Endgame” is a truly epic movie. It has the feel of a musical finale, the insurmountable odds of “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King,” the warped reality of a “Wrinkle in Time,” and the Goku-one-light-beam-overcoming-the-other-light-beam phenomenon we have grown familiar with akin to “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2”. The movie features 10 minutes of the coolest action sequence of any Marvel movie to date with dramatic tension that makes sense and requires a prolonged fight without the “how in God’s name are these characters still punching each other” feel of some Marvel fight sequences.
Captain America and Iron Man are the clear centerpieces of “Endgame” and deliver resounding performances. Chris Evans (Captain America) has spoken in interviews how emotional this movie has made him, and his work onscreen shows a level of commitment and versatility I had not seen from him before. The degrees of interconnectedness that Tony Stark and his family have in the Marvel universe makes Iron Man a focal point in “Endgame” with the emotionally gripping relationship he has with Spider-Man and Ms. Potts, to his clever and sarcastic wit with the other Avengers.
There are some odd quirks to the film. Without spoiling it, “Endgame” does a really peculiar thing with Thor that for the life of me I can’t understand. It seems beyond superfluous. Hawkeye also has a weird first act that doesn’t fit the tone of his character or the rest of the movie. Also, Michael Peña from Ant-Man doesn’t make a cameo and that is a crying shame.
Besides all that, “Endgame” is nearly flawless.
The old refrain of funerals is that its not so much a goodbye, but a celebration of someone’s life, and that is precisely what “Avengers: Endgame” does. This chapter of the Avengers is closed. Marvel hasn’t indicated what’s in the next phase, but these characters and this movie round out a 10-year journey that has been thrilling, dynamic, and powerful.
Tyler Grant (@TyGregoryGrant) is a Young Voices contributor, who completed a Fulbright Fellowship in Taiwan. He writes movie reviews for the Washington Examiner.
