With more limited screen time than they’re used to and even more limited elbow room, the actors and characters (in what at least some knew would be their swan songs in these costumes) snap off one-liners and sharp remarks with an extra edge of sarcastic disdain. The effect is both scatter-shot and precise, knowing and witty enough to be initially disarming and ultimately ingratiating. The sharp-witted answer delivered by writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and directors Anthony and Joe Russo, under the supervision of Marvel Films maestro Kevin Feige, is to acknowledge the traffic jam of egos and play it for laughs. Strange, Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers, Tom Holland’s Spider-Man and even Chadwick Boseman’s more even-keeled Black Panther going to like having to share the heroic spotlight with one another, while also allowing some derring-do and dazzling deeds to be performed by at least another dozen characters with unusual talents? “Huge” is the operative word here - for budget, scope and size of the global audience.īack in Hollywood’s big studio heyday, the grandest company of them all, MGM, boasted of having “more stars than there are in heaven.” Marvel could arguably make that argument today, and it’s crammed almost all of them into this one densely packed superhero orgy, the first half of which is basically dedicated to finding a semi-coherent way of shuffling them into the same dramatic deck. This grand, bursting-at-the-seams wrap-up to one crowded realm of the Marvel superhero universe starts out as three parts jokes, two parts dramatic juggling act and one part deterministic action, an equation that’s been completely reversed by the time of the film’s startling climax. “We’re in the endgame now,” Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange intones in the final stretch of the indisputably epic Avengers: Infinity War - and, more than in any other comics-derived superhero concoction one could mention, there’s a whiff of something resembling tragedy in a franchise that, for millions of fans, seems to play a role similar to what mythology did for the Greeks.
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