Infinity War manages to check off enough boxes to make it a must-watch for anyone who has even the slightest vested interest in the MCU.
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It has taken ten years and 18 (!) movies to get to this point in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and expectations are riding higher than ever on Avengers: Infinity War, especially following what is easily one of the best Marvel movies to date (Black Panther, for anyone who’s living under a rock). For the most part, the film does deliver and is the best Avengers movie so far, but as it’s essentially (and somewhat frustratingly) incomplete, Infinity War fails to deliver the catharsis that many fans must have been looking forward to. While the film will for sure go gangbusters at the box office, Infinity War feels a little perfunctory, too neat and orchestrated for its own good.
A large contributing factor is the film’s rather oddly positioned cliffhanger “finale”, which can come across as a cheat, as though the entire two-plus hour film is merely a very extended trailer of the yet-untitled fourth Avengers movie due in 2019. The film also occasionally creaks under the sheer weight of its immense roster of characters, and it’s clear that despite the deft machinations of scribes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, they did not manage to make every character’s appearance in the film a meaningful one.
Particularly disappointing is how flat Thanos comes across, despite a rather effective motion capture performance by Josh Brolin (though the character’s design is not helped by an early dig by Chris Pratt’s Starlord in the film, which assuredly is something many audiences will be unable to unsee thereafter, myself included). Thanos exists almost purely as a plot device to move things along, and is really only effective in a single scene that prominently features Zoe Saldana’s Gamora (who gives one of the most memorable performances in the franchise so far). For a villain that has been built up over multiple films in the past years, this is an underwhelming showing.
Despite the flaws inherent in the film, Infinity War manages to check off enough boxes to make it a must-watch for anyone who has even the slightest vested interest in the MCU. There are great action set-pieces (even if some scenes threaten to overwhelm the senses), and despite the darker narrative slant, the Russo brothers still manage to find space for moments of levity. And even for a jaded moviegoer like me, just seeing some of these characters share the screen and interact with each other is still a thrill, harkening back to the earlier days of the Marvel films. It’s an ambitious gambit to throw in everything including the kitchen sink into two movies, but it works, although just barely. It will not be fair to judge Infinity War on its own, and the effectiveness of the movie can only be measured when the second half makes its appearance next year, but suffice to say that despite feeling a little irked, my interest remains piqued.
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