Avengers: Endgame — A spoiler-free review

IT'S a mess, ok? A glorious, fun, moving and mostly satisfying mess to be sure, but Avengers: Endgame is reaching for incredible heights and the fact that it mostly delivers makes it worthy of your time.

Directors Anthony and Joe Russo team up again with screen writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely for the sequel to Avengers: Infinity War to visit Earth in a dark place. Thanos has won, half the life in universe was erased in the Snappening, leaving the core Avengers, Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, and Black Widow (along with a few other heroes they’ve picked up along way) coping with their massive failure.

But when an encounter offers them the chance to live up to the name Avengers, the heroes spring into action. What follows is a an epic journey from one end of the universe to another and various places in between.

The plot gets a bit dense and the specifics need to experienced first hand, hence the lack of details. But the movie delivers 95% of the goods y’all, in a rollicking and at times incredibly humorous way as the characters work to resolve various issues.

Where Avengers: Endgame shines is in the human beats as the heroes grapple with their lose and attempt to move on. Some of them have gone to dark places, while others are barely coping. Ironically, this is also where the film falls short.

Due to the sheer number of characters in the movie, even with so many gone, it's impossible to spend a good amount of time with them all, and we're left with a few big headliners to carry the film.

An understandable choice, but it leaves you wondering if the action packed and incredibly thrilling battle scenes could have been trimmed by a minute or two to give us a few more moments with personal favorites.

Avengers: Endgame does exactly what it promises, taking you on the final steps of ten year journey with group of characters you’ve come to love. It also manages the neat trick of opening this huge universe to more amazing possibilities.

Marvel and Disney have been coy about what comes next, but they have set the stage for a great new chapter, even as they say goodbye to this one.