E N D G A M E
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcMBFSGVi1c
Review by Joe Viglione
2:15 am
It was a dark and stormy night. Quite literally, driving up to the Woburn Cinema for a 10 pm showing of Endgame. Now y'all know I had tickets for the screening this Tuesday past, but sometimes one's workload is so crushing we have to sacrifice what is, up until Christmas when the next Star Wars movie comes out, the most important motion picture of the year.
Important, of course - in this regard - is an unclear, somewhat nebulous term. Endgame is not Citizen Kane, nor is it Gone With the Wind. Its importance is that the majority of moviegoers on planet Earth are going to be watching the Avengers, and we're not talking Diana Rigg/Patrick Macnee here.
and though the nicely done wallpaper looks heroic, it displays only one side of this film's coin.
Disney/Marvel is too smart a team to mess with success, and for fans of the comic books on film genre, they play to their audience with a folksy human touch. The theme here, of course, is life, loss and an epic battle to bridge the gap. It's in slow motion, and that's ok, because those of us who love the better movies of the genre know that it doesn't get better than this. Where DC's The Dark Knight needed better editing, the three hours here work very well...I could have gone for four. What the Dark Knight has that no film can touch thus far is the most menacing villain ever, Heath Ledger as a truly psychotic Joker. Thanos, for this long-time follower of Marvel Comics, is just too over-the-top and cheesy. He is the Marvel version of Batman's Bane.
Thanos bores me in the comic book, and he was somewhat boring in the last installment of this saga. The good news is that the battle with Thanos works here, the character actually finding his own and working well as the leader of a massive force that, again, blows up the screen. Where James Cameron paced the back and forth onslaught in Avatar, there is no pacing in a knock-down drag-out superhero movie. It's a blitzkrieg pop of massive proportions, of course, which is why the darn thing is called Endgame.
* * * * *
Elizabeth Olsen as Scarlet Witch - about five appearances now between Captain America and the Avengers, with an upcoming TV show to boot, comes off somewhat like X-Men's Dark Phoenix here. The balancing act is not to have one big ink spill of too many characters, some with powers that are overlapping. How powerful is Captain Marvel? Is she really a Superman of sorts, and how does that overpower a Thanos? To this writer, Captain America is no match for Thanos, so one must suspend the imagination and it can all become a big blur.
Paul Rudd's AntMan is actually one of the central figures here and gets as much screen time as the Hulk, Iron Man and Captain America. The character development centers on the boy's club pretty much, so for those not initiated into the Avengers or the Marvel world, just sit back and enjoy the over 180 minutes of fun. The pacing is good, the battle royale keeps your attention, and Endgame wraps up a highly popular series that has made its imprint on Hollywood pointing towards all sorts of possibilities for the coming decades. 3 am.
