The hype surrounding the Avengers: Infinity War has been building so long, yet the reviews coming out don’t necessarily reflect the hopes and dreams of Marvel fans gushing over the trailers and details that have been revealed thus far.
The Marvel Universe showdown that has been years in the making is finally here, with everyone from “Guardians of the Galaxy” to “Doctor Strange” and even “Spider-Man” slated to gather in “Avengers: Infinity War.”
Sure, “Infinity War” earned a solid 87 percent rating on Rotten Tomato’s famous “tomatometer,” but outlets as prestigious as The New York Times and Chicago Tribune are offering some tough critiques.
Most Marvel movies tend to receive rave reviews from critics and viewers alike — and this one certainly has and will too — so we decided in good fun to offer a glimpse of the viewpoints held by those who weren’t as impressed.
Don’t worry. No spoilers here
Josh Brolin in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ (inset: Alan Silvestri).
The New York Times – ‘makes very little sense’
Considered on its own, as a single, nearly 2-hour-40-minute movie, “Avengers: Infinity War” makes very little sense, apart from the near convergence of its title and its running time.
The action is especially tedious and predictable. I mean both the scenes of fighting and flying and the overall rhythm of the first two hours or so.
People talk for a while, sprinkling jokes and morsels of personality into the heavy dough of exposition. Then they fight in the usual way, by throwing giant objects (and one another) and shooting waves of colour from their hands.
The noisy, bloated spectacles of combat were surely the most expensive parts of the movie, but the money seems less like an imaginative tool than a substitute for genuine imagination.
Chicago Tribune – ‘a marketing convergence seminar’
“Avengers: Infinity War” is a lot of movies. You can hate it and still say that much with confidence.
Its various, overlapping fan bases won’t hold what they don’t like against it, I bet. “A lot,” though, doesn’t mean it’s much fun or even very good. … This isn’t a movie. It’s a marketing convergence seminar.
Bigger isn’t always better.
It’s like if “We Are the World” had to squeeze in three more verses to give Prince, Van Halen, Duran Duran, Phil Collins, Elton John and Madonna time to shine.
It’s too much. Too many characters, too much action, too much everything. It’s a superhero surplus with too many heroes and not enough screen. It’s “Infinity” overload.
Whatever else it may be — a culmination, an obligation, a staggering feat of crowd control, a truly epic tease — “Avengers: Infinity War” is a brisk, propulsive, occasionally rousing and borderline-gutsy continuation of a saga that finally and sensibly seems to be drawing to a close.
My initial fear was that “Avengers: Infinity War” would be a hopeless, planet-hopping traffic jam of a movie, a black hole of enervating cinematic chaos.
The reality may be even more depressing: It works just fine, and that’s all it was ever meant to do. Few of the characters leave us wanting more because there doesn’t, at this late phase, appear to be anything more.
Time Magazine – ‘no pulse’
There’s no pacing in “Avengers: Infinity War.” It’s all sensation and no pulse. Everything is big, all of the time.
[T]here’s potential poetry buried deep in Avengers: Infinity War. But it’s not a sturdy enough crocus to push through the movie’s ironclad surface.
Share Your Comments