SPOILER ALERT

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Stop reading if you don’t want the movie spoiled. This is your last warning. I’m not kidding. I’m gonna spoil the shit outta this movie. Okay, there, I warned you.

Before we even see the title screen, I’m crying. Hawkeye is in an open field, teaching his daughter to shoot a bow and arrow. His sons are playing catch. His wife is making dinner. I know what’s about to happen and I’m silently, futilely pleading with the screen to not do it. By the time the ash hits the sky, I’m a mess. Thank god the theater is dark. We’re only like two minutes into the movie. A few minutes later, Thor takes an axe to Thanos’ neck, sending his ginormous head tumbling to the ground. My jaw is on the floor. My emotions are all over the fucking place. HOW IS THIS ONLY THE FIRST 5% OF THE MOVIE?!????

And then it kinda just falls flat.

Okay, now let me get this outta the way before anyone gets super mad at the title of this post: Avengers: Endgame is a fine movie. It’s sufficiently good. At times, it straddles the border of great. Its best moments are exceptional. But even those can’t escape some of its worst moments. And those are the ones I wanna talk about.

Ok, let’s get to it then…

Fat Thor

After failing to stop Thanos and then chopping the titan’s head off in a futile act of frustration, Thor spends the next five years dealing with his feelings of inadequacy by living in a shack with his loser friends. Okay, fine, it’s a silly premise, but the rest of the storyline (the death, the destruction, the coping) is heavy enough that it can use a little humor here and there. The writers weren’t done, though, because apparently Thor has also spent the entire five years drinking enough beer to turn his body from something out of Homer’s Illiad to Homer Simpson.

Yes, Thor, God of Thunder, is played by Chris Hemsworth…wearing a fat suit. What. The. Fuck.

Hemsworth, himself, had made it known to the studio that he was bored with the role and wanted to do something a little different with it, which is understandable. The original Thor and Dark World were largely forgettable as movies, but also as a character. But Ragnarok showed that he could be fun. And Infinity War showed that he can be fucking awesome. So, obviously, the next logical step, riding the momentum of Thor’s dominant role in Infinity War…was to turn him in to Professor Klump.

The gag runs so long and so often through the movie that it makes what should be powerful moments seem entirely too light and stupid. There were many ways to handle Thor’s understandable downward spiral to rock bottom and his eventual comeback. This was literally the worst way.

Time Travel Yearbook

When you realized in Ant-Man and the Wasp that the Quantum Realm may hold the key to going back in time and defeating Thanos, it felt like that was opening the door for a truly amazing plot in Endgame. Noooope! Ultimately, what the writers chose to do with their time travel was take you on a tour of all the movies you already saw. Remember Avengers? Remember Winter Soldier?? Remember Thor 2??? (Wait, what, no, why would anyone wanna remember that????)

The most prominent scenes in the Marvel: Remember This? montage obviously, and rightfully, belong to Cap and Iron Man (with a little Ant-Man help). And the elevator scene alone is a perfect nod to a past movie and a huge moment from the Captain America comic book itself. But what could be a fun exploration of time travel and its possibilities quickly becomes one long Ocean’s 11 knock-off with the writers killing an hour of run time winking and nodding at you with all the subtlety of a Hulk smash.

I guess I understand. We all knew Chris Evans was hanging it up. Tony Stark had been trying to get out of the superhero business for the last four movies. This was the end. Give the fans some nostalgia, tie up the loose ends and give the characters their closure. And they did. But it went on entirely too long and came at the expense of making an actual movie with an actual plot, which became noticeable in scenes like…

Black Widow’s Death

SPOILER ALERT! Black Widow dies. Don’t worry, it’s not a memorable death at all. See, Hawkeye and Black Widow go to Vormir to retrieve the Soul Stone, but as we all know from Infinity War, you can’t just grab the stone and run. You have to throw something you love over the edge of a cliff first. In Infinity War, there’s a moment where your brain registers the thing Thanos loves juuuuuuust before Gamora does, and your heart breaks a little realizing what’s about to happen. This time, without the element of surprise, knowing that one of them was definitely going to die, the writers needed time to build the weight of the moment and truly establish their bond. They needed an extra 15 minutes for character development. (Hey, if only we hadn’t gone back to meet Iron Man’s dad!)

Instead, what we got was…*checks notes*…a fight scene. Not even a good one. Hawkeye and Black Widow literally tripping over each other to decide who gets to commit suicide first, like we would all joke about doing on Twitter if Trump were re-elected. I was secretly hoping they both fell off the cliff and nobody got the stone.

Tha…nope Get it? Like Thanos, but with nope. Never mind.

There was a lot less Thanos in this movie than there should have been. He’s a masterpiece of a villain. Perfectly portrayed. Perfectly acted. I mean, he’s enormous and purple, but still seems entirely human. You never get the feeling that he’s too cheesy or over-the-top. Not using him more when the story is literally about him seems like a huge fucking waste. And when you finally get to the fight between The Mad Titan and the heroes at the end, you’re like “Ohhhhhh, shit, so this is what this movie could have been!”

Girl Power

During the large scale fight scene at the end, there’s this moment where all of the female characters come together to kick some ass for about seven seconds before it returns to largely ignoring women altogether. It was incredibly heavy-handed and specifically put in the movie to get #GIRLPOWER trending on Twitter. And it was totally unearned. You killed off most of the cool women in Infinity War, sacrificed Black Widow for a Hawkeye storyline that you probably won’t even pursue, and sent Captain Marvel away for most of this movie to run intergalactic errands. But, sure, girl power!

A. THREE. HOUR. MOVIE.

Are you fucking kidding me? I have the bladder of a camel and even I spent the last 45 minutes of the movie crossing my legs to hold my piss so I wouldn’t miss anything.