It All Comes Down To This: Is 'Avengers: Endgame' The Ending We Deserve?

AVENGERS: ENDGAME

★★★

For a film so concerned with finality, it’s no surprise that Avengers: Endgame has retirement on its mind. Tasked with bringing an end to the Avengers series, Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the careers of many of the studio’s superhero staples, it’s a film about endings, a rare bird in an era in which every blockbuster has to suggest more films to come (and in which cinematic universes have been attempted to be built on Russell Crowe’s cockney accent).

Endgame begins mid-retirement: in a pre-logos cold-open where Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) is happily out to pasture on an All-American farm, replete with fluttering stars-and-stripes flag, wife manning the grill, and kids playing catch. But, then, the fam suddenly vanish in the climactic ‘snap’ from the prior picture, Avengers: Infinity War immediately setting the oh-so-emo tenor of the film (“it’s going to be a real tearjerker,” we’re warned, in the very next scene).

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Soon after, the giant-purple-wrinkly-chin-dude responsible for wiping out that family, big bad Thanos (Josh Brolin), is tracked down by the remaining Avengers on a far-off planet. It’s an Edenic Paradise For One; Thanos having retired, after doing the dirty work of wiping out half of all life in the universe, to a wood cabin, the sole building on a planet he’s greened up with a flick of his wrist. There, he’s ditched the armour for a casual t-shirt, the helmet for a sun-sensible floppy hat. He spends his days making stews from fresh-picked vegetables from his organic garden, adding pinches of salt where need be. Wanting to just peacefully kick back in a much-less-populated time on an unpopulated planet, Thanos puts up no fight against the revengin’ Avengers; and, barely 20 minutes in, we’ve learnt that revenge is a dish not nearly as tasty as a well-salted stew.

After a dramatically-meted out FIVE (pause) YEARS (pause) LATER title-card, we find a host of our heroes — Hawkeye, Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Captain America (Chris Evans) — all sporting new haircuts, coming to terms with a brave new world rebuilt in the wake of tragedy; a place where sports-teams’ve been put on hold, food options seem limited, and support groups are necessary. Faced with such a bleak realm, MCU OG Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr) has, of course, retired. Settling down with long-time love-interest Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and siring an adorable child, he’s living the good life in a house built by an idyllic lake; the opposing alpha-males who fought an Infinity War for the fate of the universe now matching in their desire to put their feet up surrounded by verdant nature.

Inevitably, RDJ is lured out of retirement — like Robert Redford, who comes out of his own acting retirement to cameo, here — by that oldest of all tropes: One Last Job. Bouncing out of the Quantum Realm he was lost to during Ant-Man And The Wasp’s credits, Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) has come up with a crazy ploy to stage a “time heist”, using very-sciencey sounding quantum physics to use time-travelling to CTRL+Z all the damage done in the last film; Infinity War’s infinity glove not simply a universe-shaking tool of destruction, but the ultimate get-out-of-jail deus ex machina.

The plan is to travel back to points in time where the remaining heroes — whose ranks also include the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), War Machine (Don Cheadle), Nebula (Karen Gillan), Rocket (the non-Jackson-Maine voice of Bradley Cooper) and Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who’s comically transformed into a beer-bloated, dressing-gown-and-hoodie-clad dude — can filch them before tapping out of the timeline. Upon returning to the here-and-now, the snap can be undone, the dead can walk amongst us, every actor to ever appear in any prior MCU picture can stage a cameo, and Marvel can count all this crazy box-office coin. All hail our blockbuster overlords.

In what’s Endgame’s most inspired — and so self-referential it borders on cannibalistic — choice, this heist is turned into an appropriation of Marvel’s own back-catalogue. Just as Christopher Nolan’s Inception turned its incursions into the subconscious into various discrete, genre-movie dreamworlds, this Avengers heist finds our heroes venturing into a host of stylistically-distinct cinematic realms: past Marvel movies.

In a grand act of recombinant digital wizardry, the present action — with conversational references to Back To The Future and the cinematic rules of time-travel; making Endgame weird movie-joke kin to Happy Death Day 2U and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part — intersects with the studio’s recent past. Here, the heist lifts not just invaluable glowing MacGuffins, but scenes, sequences, sideburns, and special effects showreels from an array of not-at-all-matching Marvel movies: Avengers; Thor: The Dark World; Guardians Of The Galaxy; Captain America: The Winter Soldier; Dr. Strange; Avengers: Infinity War.

For the makers of Endgame — directors Anthony and Joe Russo, writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely — the 22nd MCU movie was always going to be a juggling act, but here they make it a whole circus show; even adding a showstopper highwire trip back to a 1970s in which Michael Douglas was fresh-faced and Iron Man was but a bun in the oven. Previous Avengers movies, all too aware of serving as tentpoles for the whole Marvel big-top, have laboured under the task of the team-up. Here, by bringing together not just familiar characters but whole prior pictures, the makers turn this from burden to blast; this crazed raid on recent Marvel past audacious, ambitious, and happily ridiculous.

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In this way, it feels like Endgame embraces, in some grand group hug, its impossible task of being all things to all people, a simultaneous sequel to 21 other movies, the grand finale to end all Most Ambitious Crossover Events In History. A film this big — 180 minutes, 70+ characters, ∞ references — should struggle under the weight of its own largesse, but Markus and McFeely find a way to make the studio-issued task-at-hand seem like some great cinematic sleight-of-hand.

Of course, once we’ve pirouetted through previous episodes, there’s the much-less-impressive matter of the final fight for all the marbles/glowing-stones, where Thanos and an endless army of alien monsters square off against every hero-adjacent MCU member ever seen; Avengers membership, these days, carrying all the rarity and prestige of a participation ribbon. As the painfully familiar trope goes: two vast opposing CGI armies run towards each other, yelling, into climactic battle. It’s a never-impressive, tediously-tropey visual we can trace from Black Panther back through endless fantasy entertainments, minted for the new millennium by the Lord Of The Rings series.

Like Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King, another three-hour conclusion to an epic (ie. $$$) adventure, Avengers: Endgame ends with a bunch of ends, each more end-like than the last. In a film filled with so many familiar faces, it’s like the Russos don’t quite know where to leave off, who to bestow with the final bow, the last lines of banter. But, once they finally leave off, Endgame lives up to its notion of finality: this the first MCU movie to ever actually just end, and not give us more in the credits. Sure, the next Spider-Man is due ever so soon, but, for a moment, this last Avengers actually feels like enough.