- UK release: April 2019
- Director: Anthony Russo · Joe Russo
- Writers: Christopher Markus · Stephen McFeely
- Studio / distributor: Marvel Studios; Walt Disney Studios
- Genre: Superhero ensemble / time-travel adventure · Runtime: 181 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Robert Downey Jr (Iron Man, Sherlock Holmes) as Tony Stark; Chris Evans (Captain America: The First Avenger, Snowpiercer) as Steve Rogers; Scarlett Johansson (Lost in Translation, Lucy) as Natasha Romanoff; Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men) as Thanos
- Rotten Tomatoes: 94% critics / 90% audience · My rating: 8.5 / 10
Eleven years ago Marvel released a mid-budget film about a weapons dealer who builds himself a suit of armour, and almost nobody outside the comics shops expected what followed. Twenty-one films later, Avengers: Endgame is the bill coming due on the most audacious gamble in modern studio film-making: that an audience would sit still for a story told in instalments across a decade and pay off only at the end. Infinity War did the unthinkable last year and let the villain win. The interesting question now is not whether the Russo brothers can undo it, but whether they have the nerve to make us wait for it.
The setup
The opening hour is the surprise. After Thanos wiped out half of all life with a click of his fingers, the survivors are not regrouping for a counterattack so much as living in the wreckage of having lost. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is adrift, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is running a support group for the grieving, and the team that remains is held together by little more than habit and Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson). When a slim chance to reverse the loss appears, it sends them back through their own history, which is both a heist plot and an excuse to revisit where all this began. I will leave the mechanics of how vague, because half the pleasure is watching the plan assemble.
The cast
What holds this together is that the people matter more than the powers. Downey has carried the franchise from the start, and he gives Stark a weariness here that the earlier films, with all their quips, never quite let him show. Evans is the moral spine, and Captain America has rarely been used better than in the quieter beats where the role is simply to keep going. Johansson’s Romanoff carries more weight than her billing suggests, the loyalty of the team made flesh. Josh Brolin’s Thanos, again a performance-capture creation, remains the rare blockbuster villain who believes he is the reasonable one, and that conviction is what makes him land. Around them a vast ensemble files through, and the film is disciplined enough to give the leads room rather than service everyone equally.
The craft
Three hours is a long sit, and the remarkable thing is how rarely it drags. The Russos and editors Jeffrey Ford and Matthew Schmidt structure it as three distinct movements: grief, the caper, and the reckoning, each with its own tempo. Alan Silvestri’s score does heavy lifting, his Avengers theme deployed sparingly enough that it still raises the hair when it returns. Trent Opaloch shoots the back half on a scale that genuinely earns the IMAX surcharge, and the final act is the kind of set-piece these films have been building the muscle to deliver for a decade. There are seams. The time-travel logic does not survive much scrutiny, and the film knows it, heading off the pedants with a joke. But the craft serves the emotion rather than burying it.
How it stacks up
The obvious comparison is Infinity War, and Endgame is the warmer, more human half of the pair: less relentless, more willing to be still. Reach further back and the model is The Empire Strikes Back into Return of the Jedi, a downbeat middle resolved by a finale that has to carry years of accumulated feeling. The time-travel structure openly winks at Back to the Future Part II, characters wandering through their own earlier scenes. What none of those had to manage is the sheer weight of continuity here, twenty-one films of setup that this one has to honour and close. That it mostly succeeds, and finds room for grief inside a popcorn spectacle, is no small feat.
Critics versus the rest of us
The reception is close to a coronation. Critics are at 94%, audiences only a touch behind at 90%, and the few dissenting notes concede the obvious: you get out of this exactly what you put in over eleven years, and a newcomer would be lost. That is a fair charge and also beside the point for anyone who has been along for the ride. The reviewers who shrug at the genre are reviewing the homework; the rest of us are reviewing the reunion. My own number sits a fraction below the critical wave, not because the film disappoints but because its pleasures are inseparable from the investment it assumes.
Verdict
This is the rare franchise finale that respects the time you have given it. It is too long, the plotting is sentimental about its own mythology, and you cannot drop in cold. None of that dents the central achievement: an event film with real stakes, real loss, and a payoff that lands the emotional beats a decade in the building. It is enormously rewatchable for anyone who came up with these characters, and it closes the door on its central arc with more grace than a film this size has any right to. 8.5⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now. See it in IMAX if you can, and clear the afternoon.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Endgame briefly became the highest-grossing film ever released, and the Infinity Saga it closes is now packaged as the first twenty-three films of the MCU. The franchise pressed on with Spider-Man: Far From Home weeks later and a steady run of films and Disney+ series since, none of which has matched this one for sense of occasion. It is now available on disc and digital, and streams on Disney+.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There is frequent moderate fantasy violence, including occasional bloody detail. At one point a character is impaled, although there is no graphic detail.
Threat and horror: There are mild scenes of threat, including characters being chased.
Language: There is occasional use of mild bad language, including ‘piss’, ‘son of a bitch’, ‘crap’, ‘asses’, ‘dickhead’ and ‘shit’.
Sex: There is some mild rude humour and innuendo, including several jokes about a man’s buttocks.
Injury detail: There is some sight of blood in the aftermath of violence.
Alcohol and smoking: Adult characters drink alcohol.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
