Inifinity War
Hot Take: If your movie is THREE HOURS LONG, you shouldn’t bother with a post credits sequence. You had an extra hour to tell the story you wanted to tell.
So Thanos murdered my bladder, I watched him smile contentedly, and decided I’d had my fill. I still haven’t seen the movie where Thor loses his eye or the Guardians of the Galaxy recruit Mantis, and I managed to keep up, so I stand by my decision to leave the theater when I did.
Most of the movie was pretty good. The worst parts are whenever any combination of Iron Man, Dr. Strange, and Peter Quill inter act, and it becomes apparent that they’re basically the same character.
Doc: Listen, I’m a snarky white guy, so here’s what we need to do.
Tony: Hold on a minute, Mumford from Sesame Street. I’m a snarky white guy, and I think we ought to do this.
Star-Lord: No, you hold on! I’m also a snarky white guy, and I like the movie Footloose, so I’m pretty sure I’m snarkier and whiter than both of you.
I was concerned about the sheer size of the cast, but I see now that this was never the problem. The movie does a decent job handling all the characters, prioritizing which ones to use, and making sure the principals each have something to do. No, the problem is that the sheer population of the movie greatly increases the number of characters I don’t like.
I never cared for Gwyneth Paltrow as Pepper Potts. This goes all the way back to Iron Man 1 in 2008. To me it just feels like Iron Man hired Gwyneth Paltrowto work for him and they fell in love and moved in together, which isn’t completely out of character for him. Never once have I watched her performance and thought she was portraying a character. I never minded, because the Iron Man moves were pretty good in spite of this, and the first two Avengers movies managed to dilute her presence even further with all the other characters I like.
With Avengers 3, that starts to backfire, because Pepper hasn’t gone away, and now we’re joined by other characters I’d managed to avoid over the years. I wanted no part of Benedict Cumberbatch’s Dr. Strange movie, and today I see that this was a good call, because he’s a total joke in “Infinity War”. He just looks and acts like Robert Downey Jr.’s stunt double, only he uses magic instead of Borg nanoprobes or whatever. He’s presented like a big deal, except the only thing going for him is that he has an Infinity Stone, which is useless since Thanos has two, and the other characters who only had one didn’t get anywhere either. Spider-Man acts like a kid who won a contest to play Spider-Man in this moive. This is Spidey’s third outing in the MCU, and he still acts starstruck around Tony Stark. He doesn’t make jokes, he just constantly reminds everyone how young and inexperienced he is, just like... some other popular comic book character who isn’t Spider-Man.
The thing is, I’ve been okay with the MCU versions of things, mostly because they get it right often enough to make up for when they’ve gotten things wrong, but a movie like this kind of amplifies those flubs. That’s the problem with these sorts of ambitious crossovers. They’re not always peanut butter and chocolate. Sometimes they can be jelly and motor oil, or a hundred other things that may not hold up in combination.
To be fair, the good far outweighs the bad. Bruce Banner/The Hulk has always been great. They really nailed Thanos in this movie, which is a good thing because he’s the centerpiece of the whole thing. I like Mantis, and the other Guardians of the Galaxy are still cool, and so forth. I’m kind of diappointed that the Wakandans didn’t get more to do, or the Black Widow, or Wong since he apparently has super powers now. But it mostly holds up.
I just don’t know that it needed to be a three hour movie. Seems like you could cut down a lot of the run time just by having the characters make smarter decisions. If the Inifinity Stones are so powerful that Thanos can outclass anyone just by having two of them, then why didn’t anyone try using the others instead of simply hiding them or trying to destroy them? If Strange has the Time Gem, why didn’t he just reverse time to before Thanos got the other gems, the same way Thanos used the Time Gem to un-destroy the Mind Gem? Why didn’t the Vision use the Mind Gem to trick Thanos into thinking he already had it? Knives and guns seem to work on Thanos despite his incredible power, but when Peter Quill has him at his mercy, he just hits him instead, and only just hard enough to free him from the other characters who were holding him down. Why do Banner and War Machine get Iron Man armor, but Falcon can’t even get sleeves for his suit? Why do the Wakandans have to run into battle? They had vehicles in the last movie.
Maybe I’ve reached peak MCU, where the movies have gone far enough and long enough that I can no longer suspend my disbelief. Thanos opened the movie by crushing Thor and Loki and the Incredible Hulk, and I’m supposed to buy that the other characters can slow him down for the next 145 minutes. It’s a tough sell.
