Several of the narrative problems that are present in Infinity War are not resolved or made worse by this remarkably lazy film. Of note, Thanos' ideology is both utterly incoherent and utterly alien to the Zeitgeist. The writers simply lacked the courage to make Thanos into the eugenicist that he so clearly should be. Without that edge to him he is a scene chewing comic book *villain* in the worse way. I simply did not care about the plot because the villain is a snidely whiplash joke. The film doubles down on the idiocy present in Infinity War as Thanos' end goal is just more so. This problem renders the film hollow, emotionally inert.

That might have been overlooked if the film's overall structure wasn't, more or less, identical to Infinity War. Starting at about 30 minutes in the two films run remarkably in parallel with each other. The pieces are slightly jumbled and certain characters end up playing different beats but act to act, sequence to sequence, scene to scene the underlying scaffolding of the plot is the same. This would be better if the plotting wasn't redundant in the first place. Infinity War boiled down to 6 color coded chase scenes over MacGruffins. The same is true in Endgame but even more so. The plot device introduced to allow the team a fighting chance produces whole manners of plot contrivances, incoherence and murky what the heck is happening. There are 21 other films in the series and while I have seen every single one (some more than 3 times!) I simply don't have the convoluted metaphysics memorized. If you saw each film once in the theatre as they were released parts of this mess will confuse you.

On that note the Infinity Stones are even more MacGruffins in this film as Endgame doesn't even bother to try to visualize their various powers. Infinity War turned magick users into mere boxers and this film continues to lower the bar for imaginative use of space magick. I still don't understand what the difference between, say, the space stone and reality stone is practically. There is nothing in the film that demonstrates their powers. This adds to the rote laziness that the film embodies.

Inevitably in a film like this a few characters will get short changed. This happened here to my favorite character. For a film that so copied its predecessor's structure I am gobsmacked that not all re-matches occurred in the action scenes. Some of them do, but a pretty obvious and possibly entertaining one doesn't. On top of that the final moment-key to a character and the plot- is overly telegraphed due to the extraordinary amount of time spent with said character and the seeming checklist they have for a farewell tour. The balance is wrong for the character relationships. You can more or less guess the consequences based on screen time.

None of the consequences of the two films seem final, abet textually a few of them are (I guess). Capital being what it is Disney would never kill off a bunch of Golden Geese; it was always faintly absurd the two films pretended otherwise. This narrative holdover from Infinity War takes a lot of heat out of the film.

There are a few nice quips. There are also some promising team up moments in the film that point to brighter days. But in the end this is navel gazing nonsense.