Avengers: Endgame Review

The remarkable thing about Endgame is that a film carrying twenty-one predecessors and every commercial expectation of its decade opens with forty-five minutes of failure. The Russos let the surviving Avengers sit in grief, give Thor a beer gut and a breakdown, and kill the villain in the first act, which is a genuinely strange choice at this scale. What follows is a heist through the studio's own back catalogue, and the nostalgia turns out to be load bearing rather than decorative: Tony Stark meeting his father, Thor speaking to Frigga and Steve Rogers fighting himself are payoffs a decade of setup had actually earned.

Alan Silvestri's score does more emotional lifting than the dialogue ever attempts. The final battle is a crowded, muddy digital field where geography dissolves, and the time travel rules do not survive a minute of scrutiny. But the portals, the assemble line and Robert Downey Jr's exit come closer to a curtain call that feels earned than any franchise has managed. We rate it a payoff rather than a film, and it is a superb one.