Avengers: Endgame

Applause broke out mid-screening and again at the credits, and viewers describe whole rows in tears and smudged mascara in the lobby — the shared theatrical event is what many lead with. Praise clusters on the final hour: the massed battle, the score, and the sense that twenty-odd earlier films suddenly paid off at once. Robert Downey Jr. draws admiration even from viewers who disliked the rest, and Chris Evans is regularly named beside him. Plenty single out the character farewells and the nostalgia of revisiting older movies, saying three hours never felt like three hours.

Time travel is the sticking point. Detractors line up plot holes they say the film never closes, and several argue the long middle stretch crawls before the finale rescues it. A frequent grievance concerns Thor and Hulk, whom many viewers say were reduced to comic relief and never restored; another concerns Thanos, remembered from the previous film as complex and philosophical, described here as flattened into a generic villain. Captain Marvel's uneven deployment draws repeated complaints, as does the screen time spent on Hawkeye at the expense of better-loved characters.

One pattern recurs often enough to note: the film shrinks on reflection. Viewers who walked out elated report that a second, expectation-free viewing left them bored, and more than one says their estimate falls the longer they dwell on it. Bound up with that is a persistent comparison — a sizeable group holds Infinity War the tighter, more effortless film and bristles that this one is more widely celebrated, while defenders counter that the two are a single story and only the second half was ever meant to deliver closure.

Written from the reviews Rankquant collected for this title, and AI-curated from them. Opinions are the reviewers', not Rankquant's.