Netflix Review - Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (12)

The elves went too far!

The Gist: Icelandic fisherman Lars Erickssong (Will Ferrall) has nursed a dream of representing his country in the Eurovision Song Contest since childhood, when he witnessed ABBA's revelatory performance of Waterloo. With lifelong friend Sigrid (Rachel McAdams) he plays village pub gigs in Eurovision covers-band Fire Saga, their own neighbours threatening to boo them offstage, if they perform their own songs rather than Contest classic Ja Ja Ding Dong. Then several combined flukes of fate puts Lars' dream within reach, pitching him and Sigrid into the madness of Eurovision. Once there it's their proclivity for onstage disaster as much as ambitious fellow-contestants that threatens both their friendship and their shot at the big glittery prize.

The Juice: The Story of Fire Saga will probably play best to those who already know and love (in however ironic a sense) the real Eurovision Song Contest. Here in the UK it's been an annual TV event from way before I was born - ridiculed for years, before ultimately being embraced as a warm-hearted festival of kitsch. Will Ferrell treats it as such, having been introduced to the glitzy wonders of Eurovision through his Swedish wife and in-laws. As a result this is a celebration of a phenomenon way beyond satire, the movie's outlandish musical numbers only marginally more absurd than those of the actual competition.

In many senses this is as nuts-and-bolts a Will Ferrell comedy as you could get. Like Blades of Glory it's the story of a driven but disaster-prone dreamer repeatedly collaspsing on his face while striving for unlikely success. And Lars is the clumsy man-child we saw as far back as Elf and numerous times since. It's also got that tendency to ramble on too long in between its very recognisable plot beats.

What will likely keep you engaged is the film's sheer good nature and the affection is has for Eurovision's crazy brand of camp. Ferrell is never a chore to watch (2018's misguided Sherlock Holmes a best-forgotten exception), while McAdams is massively endearing as Sigrid - the wide-eyed innocent who still believes in the elves native to her country, while nursing a deep-seated but unrequited love for her best friend. She can hold a decent tune as well, even if supported digitally on the high notes by vocalist Molly Sanden. In fact the musical numbers are all well-crafted Eurovision-style pop-rock and they're delivered in appropriately over-the-top style - never more so than by the multiple scene-grabbing Dan Stevens as swaggering Russian chanteur Alexander Lemtov. But just possibly my favourite bits are those shot on location in Iceland, the brightly authentic folk setting a visually gorgeous counterpart to Eurovision's glitzy excesses.

(Your actual elfish dwellings)

The Judgement: 6.5/10. In terms of narrative structure - yes, you've seen it all before and had it told in a more focused manner. But in terms of heart and good-humour there's lots to enjoy in a comedy that lauds the Song Contest's earnestness and inclusivity, even while making gentle fun of it. If you're Eurovision-agnostic (or just plain Eurovision-clueless), it might well leave you scratching your head. If you're an aficionado of the actual Contest, however, you'll get it - and it'll put a big grin all over your face. In a year where Covid 19 did for the real thing, Fire Saga and their competitors aren't a bad substitute.

Netflix Review - Da 5 Bloods (18)

We fought an immoral war that wasn't ours for rights we didn't have.

The Gist: Four African American veterans of the Vietnam War return to that country half a century after having left both it and the body of their fallen squad leader - 'Stormin' Norman' - behind. Their purpose for going back 'in country' is to retrieve Norman's remains along with the hoard of gold bars they left buried close to his body - originally intended as payment to South Vietnamese allies. The scars of war run deep, never more so than in the mind of Paul (Delroy Lindo), whose PTSD-fuelled paranoid threatens the whole expedition. And how far they can trust the businessman who has agreed to help them smuggle the gold out of the country is a whole other cause for concern. For these men the war turns out to be far from over...

The Juice: Da 5 Bloods is a whole lot of movie, created on a scale that makes you long to watch it on a big screen. As director Spike Lee's follow-up to BlacKkKlansman it's an epic of African American history and no less confrontational than its 2018 predecessor, while also providing a tense, thrilling and viscerally bloody jungle adventure. The gold fever that threatens to undermine these Bloods' better intentions is reminiscent of Bogart classic The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and the thriller elements are nerve-jangling, but this story always comes back to a bigger picture - of men whose lives should have mattered more to their country, whether in Vietnam or back home. It tackles the unspeakable horrors of the historic war too, confronting its audience with the most emotionally jarring news footage of the era and refusing to flinch from the imagery, however much we're inclined to do so.

In terms of its craft this is as ambitious and experimental a film as Lee has ever made. The widescreen shots of modern Ho Chi Minh City - gorgeous and colour-saturated - shrink to a boxy aspect ratio for flashback sequences involving the original '5'. The ageing actors all play themselves in pulsing action sequences from late '60s Vietnam, Black Panther's Chadwick Boseman the only youthful face among them as Stormin' Norman; no Irishman-style de-aging here, but this narrative decision makes the moments seem dreamlike, the surviving comrades recalling a spiritually-inclined warrior more in tune with his history than any of them.

The Bloods themselves convey intense camaraderie from their airport reunion and continue to sell the bond and break of these war-torn individuals, as they revisit horrors they've never truly left behind. Clarke Peters's Otis is the voice of empathy and reason throughout (Peters will always be The Wire's Lester Freamon to me) and Isiah Whitlock Jr brings an enjoyably earthy humour to Melvin, but it's Lindo who has the meatiest role as damaged Paul. Sympathetic, repellent and heartbreaking on repeat, he's a powerful study in the worst that war can do to a man. If there's a beatific glow surrounding Norman as remembered by his friends, Paul is the portrait of a man in his own private Hell. 

The Judgement: 8/10. Da 5 Bloods is a more sprawling affair than the tightly focused BlacKkKlansman, like a deli sandwich with so many ingredients that the bread can scarcely hold them all together. It also signposts one or two of its most explosive moments more than it should. That said, this reenvisioning of the 'Nam movie is full of bona fide Lee brilliance, its challenging aspects born as much of recent times as of the War itself. While the director has much to say about the conflict's repercussions (both for GIs and for Vietnam itself), it also places the Bloods' grim adventures in the broader flow of black American experience from the Civil Rights movement right up to now. It's not Lee at his absolute best, but with butt-clenching action adventure and searing political relevance, it comes pretty damn close. 

   

Short-Film Review - The Tell Tale Heart

This is the cause here... It is the beating of his hideous heart.

The Tell Tale Heart, Edgar Allen Poe's 1843 mini-tale of obsession, murder and mind-shredding guilt, is as Gothic as classic literature gets - a lurid tale with an unreliable narrator who pleads his innocence even while bathed (metaphorically and otherwise) in the blood of his victim. With its blending of crime and horror it's also a precursor to the pulpy noir stories that first proved popular half a century later. Director McClain Lindquist gets all of this in his deliciously deranged new short, one that retells Poe's story with a bold and bloody relish that would surely make the 19th century horror master smile.

Sonny Grimsley plays The Narrator, a modern take on Poe's murderous protagonist, but one psychologically rooted in a bygone pre-forensics era. Like the literary character he's carer to an elderly man who he claims to love and knows to be good, meanwhile being driven mad by a fixation with the ailing gentleman's vulture-like eye. When two detectives investigate reports of 'screaming bloody murder', they are welcomed by a man whose mannered grace belies gnawing guilt, along with a mortal terror that no deed - however wicked - can lay to rest.

Lindquist's best decision here is to embrace pure madness with every neatly structured frame and every precisely integrated sound of his devious little movie. The mansion in which the blood-letting occurs is Gothic to its foundations (the Knives Out family home sprang to mind), with richly detailed interiors and a glossy cinematic sheen that shows to best effect the classiness and the gore. But it's what he and his team do within their precision-designed setting that provide this short with its uncanny edge.

It's all about the psychology here - whether the antique clock-tick that has arguably driven our narrator deranged to begin with, or the visceral images that haunt him in the aftermath of his grim act. This simple story has been crafted into a dark and probing study of insanity, shot through with moments of pure horror. Lindquist knows every cross-cutting, shadow-casting trick in the genre playbook and uses them to juicy effect, tossing in a few unique visual flourishes of his own. He also understands when to let the camera linger at visually unsettling moments, and has the practical effects at hand to back it up. It's all steeped in a disorienting soundscape too, one that compliments Grimsley's enjoyably ripe and glowering central performance.

The Tell Tale Heart (2020) takes all that makes classic Gothic horror so enjoyable - its melodrama, it rich symbolism, its deep-dive into the murkier realms of the human psyche - and cranks them up full-volume. It's also got a deviant sense of fun in keeping with its narrator's sheer delusion. Twenty minutes inside this guy's head makes for a deliciously shuddering nightmare. It also bodes well for these filmmakers' futures - in horror or wherever else they choose to ply their cunning craft. They know their movie grammar well, and use it to deliver a story as pulsing with menace as the words Poe once inked onto his page.

Home Cinema Review - Dragged Across Concrete (18)

This is a bad idea. It's bad for you and it's bad for me. It's bad like lasagna in a can.

The Gist: Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn are Brett Ridgeman and Anthony Lurasetti, partnered cops whose hands-on brand of law enforcement in the town of Bulwark lands them in serious trouble with their captain. Newly released con Henry Johns (Tory Kittles) is contemplating a return to crime with old pal Biscuit (Michael Jai White) in order to support his problem-fraught family. The courses of action taken by all four men to remedy their situations - plus the activities in Bulwark of a deeply sinister criminal gang - threaten to converge in fashion as brutal as the film's title suggests.

The Juice: This third feature of writer/director S. Craig Zahler is set within a similarly macho genre as his other work to date. 2015's Bone Tomahawk was the most shocking western you're ever likely to see, while his 2017 prison movie Brawl in Cell Block 99 cemented his reputation as a maker of '70s-style guy-movies with intelligence to match their occasional, bone-splintering violence. So from cement to Concrete... Here we have the film-maker's longest slow-burn movie to date, and its fuse fizzes all the way to events that are suitably destructive (but more toe-curling than cathartic). 

As a director Zahler likes to properly hang out in each location, his frequently motionless but always observant camera letting the story unfold unhurried but tense, no need for recourse to an original score. (The only music in the film is a series of soul tracks penned by Zahler himself - the guy really does do everything.) His screen-writing preference is for lengthy dialogue-driven scenes that work because they're so painstakingly crafted, the words fleshing out both his characters and the morally grey world in which they exist. Tarantino comparisons might be made, but the chat here is drier in its humour and more sombre in its tone. While the wordplay is ultimately just as stylised, it give a greater sense of a real world over a movie one and the violence - when it comes - can't be so easily shrugged off as a result. Quite the reverse.

As for the story's dealings with police corruption and racial politics, that seems particularly relevant and more than a little provocative one year on from the movie's release. The ageing Ridgeman's actions in his apprehension of a Latino suspect reflect one of 2020's most contentious news stories and both Gibson and Vaughn make for problem protagonists, however fascinating. (Mel is tough-shelled and cynical, Vince does a line in well-honed witty comebacks - both have attitudes to make the liberal-oriented viewer cringe.) Kittles is more sympathetic as jailbird Henry, but everyone here is mired in one murky, discomfiting world; you might come out of it feeling more grimy than entertained. And at least one moment will shock your pants clean off.

The Judgement: 8/10. Don't mistake me - Dragged Across Concrete is a compelling piece of cinema, as impressive in the stark composition of its scenes as it is in its writing. Full of the same driven masculine behaviour as the films of Sam Peckinpah and Don Siegal (two of Zahler's self-confessed influences), it plunges its characters into even deeper moral ambiguity and lets the audience work out what the right choices were. It'll make you squirm, it'll make you shudder, occasionally it'll force a grim smile. And it'll have you wrestling with some tough questions - without giving you anything close to an answer. Keep the title in mind and brace yourself.

Netflix Review - Okja (15)

It's all edible. All edible except the squeal.

The Gist: Mija lives in the South Korean mountains with her grandfather and best friend - a pig of elephantine proportions, which she has raised from piglet to vast lumbering adult, naming the beast Okja. Known to us but not to her, Okja is one of twenty-six genetically modified super-pigs and property of the multinational Mirando corporation. When the creature is reclaimed (as planned from its birth) by Mirando, the truth becomes horribly real to Mija and she sets off in pursuit. Joining forces with a group of animal rights activists in Seoul, she determines to free the creature and return it to its rural home. But her efforts pit her against powerful and ruthless corporate opponents.

The Juice: Anyone who saw Bong Joon Ho's Oscar-bagging Parasite will have known that the Korean director's success didn't come out of nowhere. If his 7th feature film got you wondering about his back catalogue, Okja is a great place to start exploring. Just don't let its Disney-esque opening scenes of a little girl playing in the wilds with her giant lovable pig-pal fool you into thinking this is cuddly family fare. The same dark themes as in Parasite provide an unsettling undercurrent here, one that becomes steadily more assertive as the story unfolds. This director targets the excesses of 21st Century capitalism, both when developing original stories and when bringing them memorably to life on screen. 

A South Korean/US co-production for Netflix, Okja is nonetheless a big screen film through and through, boasting the same glorious widescreen framing and lustrous visuals as its award-winning successor. It opening act makes full use of Korea's lush mountain forests, before the movie plunges along with Okja and Mija into the claustrophobia of a modern urban landscape, hurtling with no little destruction through shopping malls and motorway tunnels. But it's the latter stages - containing the story's most grim satire - that become tinged with a very specific kind of horror. Through it all Okja is convincingly realised, whether lumbering through her preferred habitat or thundering in attempted escape from her persecutors. It's a tribute to both the technology and the film's direction that you buy into this outlandish story so completely.

Okja's pixelated rampage, it should be said, is backed up with a quality human cast, Korean Seo-hyun Ahn at its centre as the mega-pig's anguished but determined young companion. Tilda Swinton is funny as the corporation's brittly smiling CEO (and rather unnecessarily her twin sister) and Paul Dano empathetically heads up the animal freedom fighters, a group filled out with dependable types like Lily Collins and The Walking Dead's Steven Yeun. Jake Gyllenhaal's demented celebrity naturalist (and public face of the Mirando Corp.) is a rare example of the upper-tier actor pushing things a little too far.

The Judgement: 7.5/10. Okja is a vivid, occasionally shocking modern fable; it starts out cute, but turns fully dystopian, an initially happy face giving way to anger at corporate greed and its resultant cruelty. True the film could do with some narrative trimming, its comedy can be a bit too broad and its satire is delivered with a sledgehammer thump. But the wealth of imagination on display here more than makes up for all and the Mija/Okja relationship will warm your heart - when its not busy breaking it. This is a tale from a film-maker forging a path to greatness and demands priority on your Netflix watch list. 

Netflix Review - Dolemite is My Name (15)

It's comedy and it's sexy and it's action. It's a total entertainment experience!

The Gist: Eddie Murphy plays Rudy Ray Moore, aspiring recording artist and comedian, who in 1970s Los Angeles finds himself sorting vinyl in a Hollywood record store and and dying nightly on stage at a local bar, his best years apparently behind him. That's until he hits on his Big Idea - take the raw street poetry of the bums on a nearby block and turn it into a stage act, transforming himself into pimp-raconteur Dolemite. The new material is a lewd and riotous hit, as is his strutting new character, and recordings of his performance sold out of his car trunk also become a cult success. But Rudy thinks bigger. Inspired by the Blaxspoitation movies of the era, he decides that Dolemite will appear in a sexy action feature of his own. That's despite a complete lack of knowledge of the film industry. But with enthusiasm, half-baked plans and can-do attitude, all kinds of things prove possible...

The Juice: With Moore now referred to as the 'godfather of rap', it's no wonder that Snoop Dogg agreed to cameo in this story of the man's truly American rise to fame. Dolemite is My Name is as rude and raucous as the Moore's original comedy albums clearly were, but is also a warm and grin-inducing story of the little guy challenging the odds that the system has stacked against him. Craig Brewer's film immerses us in the vibrant black culture of 1970s LA and serves as a timely reminder that this whole other world existed then apart from the Hollywood mainstream - one that was eager to embrace the 'Dolemite' phenomenon. Murphy, whose presence reminds us of his 1999 team-up with Steve Martin in Bowfinger (a fictional story of heroically cut-price film-making), is on the finest of form - both as the hangdog Rudy whose desperation makes you cringe, and as the larger-then-life, cheer-worthy character into which he transforms himself. This is far from a one-man show, however. There's back-up in the form of lusty character turns, including from Da'Vine Joy Randolph as Moore's jaded but warmly loyal bar-singer friend Lady Reed and Wesley Snipes as preening actor-director D'Urville Martin. And Keegan-Michael Key was born to express the exasperation of playwright Jerry Jones, reluctantly persuaded on board to co-write a screenplay for a man whose idea of good plotting includes an all-girl kung fu army. 

The Judgement: 8/10. Dolemite (both this biopic and the movie character/franchise from which it takes its name) is a slice of American cultural life I didn't know I needed to know about, one replete with seamy humour, but bubbling with noisy, joyful life. The movie-with-in-a-movie element is at points uneasily reminiscent of Ed Wood and The Disaster Artist, i.e. you sense that our feature-making hero is destined for failure and ridicule, only sensitive enough to be crushed by both. In fact you end up liking him so much that you're downright fearful of it. But Moore isn't just another deluded fame-seeker. There's grit and shrewdness behind his ambition and a sense for an iron that's red-hot for striking. If you start out feeling sorry for him, soon you're laughing with him and rooting for the guy to achieve all his ridiculous dreams. Despite its frequently implausible nature, the Dolemite story happened in all its tawdry glory. This film is a brash and hilariously funny celebration of the fact. 

Feature - Avengers: Endgame - Spoiler Talk

Five years ago we lost. All of us. We lost friends. We lost family. We lost a part of ourselves. Today we have a chance to take it all back.

A year has passed and the Thanos-dust has had time to settle. Avengers: Endgame concluded a super-drama that had been built brick by filmic brick over a decade and managed it with both fan-pleasing detail and a commendable degree of story-telling integrity. I gave it a belated anniversary rewatch on Blu-ray and am pleased to report that it really holds up. Granted the quantum plot-elements still have potential to knot my cerebrum should I give them enough space-time to do so, but I'm not going even going there. In terms of tying up the strands of this comic-book mega-tale, this production team has done a heroic job, one that's worth celebrating with some spoiler-heavy thoughts on their completed work.

Co-directing heroes Anthony and Joe Russo

Screenplay-penning heroes Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely

It's worth remembering the frame of mind in which most fans initially approached Endgame. One year on from Avengers: Infinity War that unapologetically downbeat ending (a counter-intuitive stroke of genius on the part of the writing-directing team) had sunk in to the bone. In the intervening months Ant-Man and the Wasp increased the situation's direness with its mid-credits shock and while Captain Marvel confirmed that while the impressive Ms Danvers had survived the snap, there was no indication that she could do much in the line of apocalyptic reversal. Even the Endgame marketing leaned into the bleakness of it all. These surviving supers - and the universe along with them - had been properly devastated. Whatever glint of hope the trailers provided, it seemed truly desperate in nature. And rightly so. No heroes should be able to shrug off that kind of defeat without the most demanding of efforts. Well in terms of Herculean struggle, Endgame delivered.

The first of the film's neatly structured hour-long acts (you can punctuate a home viewing with coffee breaks pretty much one and two hours in) is largely devoted to the experience of loss. The look is grainy and colour-drained, the opening sequence with Clint Barton and his family music-free and eerily wind-swept - not very comic-book at all. When Hawkeye's nearest-and-dearest get 'dusted', it plunges the audience back into the despair that closed Infinity War, reminding us of all the situation's gravity. The humour of the subsequent scene with Tony Stark teaching board games to Nebula is understated and mournful. It's touching to see this unlikely pair bonding over a checkers board (a callback to Infinity War's well-judged mix-and-match of characters). The one-liners with which Tony tempers his melancholic recording for a possibly-still-existent Pepper demonstrate the distance this character has run/flown since his 2008 Ironman debut. He's worthy of a nobly tragic fate... but that'll have to wait till later. First there's rescue by Captain Marvel (a cheer-worthy moment amid all the bleakness) and a bout of bitter recrimination directed at his friends, before he stumbles into motion again on the final stage of his ten-year redemptive arc.

Back on Earth Cap and co are in the 'anger' stage of grief. Fuelled by both of those emotions along with misplaced hope, they hunt out Thanos in a move that if executed effectively, might end the film before it's begun. The first of the film's major rug-pulls is killing off the antagonist in a totally non-cathartic manner (even if Thor's 'for the head' line does provide a bitter laugh); to squash the heroes' one clear chance at reversing their Infinity defeat in the movie's first fifteen minutes is a screen-writing masterstroke, one that nixes the possibility of a cheap solution and ushers in those crucial five years of nothing. (It also establishes a loneliness that feels strangely resonant in this 2020 summer of Covid 19 lockdown; the parallels feel a touch chilling if you watch the movie right now.) This is some of what marks out Endgame as special. It doesn't just acknowledge the characters' individual and group loss, it spends serious time with it. It hangs out with Steve Rogers as he councils his fellow-bereaved in a support group. It dwells on Natasha as she tries to put out minor fires, having failed to prevent the Thanos conflagration. One of the most telling scenes of all is the pair's chat over that peanut-butter sandwich that didn't quite get thrown at Steve's head; for all the MCU's famous levity, it delivers a moment here with a tangible sense of bereavement. We feel the distance we've travelled with these characters, fully appreciating why they can't move on. The acceptance stage of the grief process simply eludes them. 

Even Tony with his new family (yes, it's a heart-warmer to see Ironman as dad to little Morgan and her 'I love you three thousand' line is stupidly adorable) keeps a photo of himself with Peter Parker, like he - or we - could ever shake the memory of the kid disintegrating in his arms. It's the indicator that despite his protestations of getting on with a new life, he will lend his brilliance to the infinity stone 'time heist', finally reuniting the Avengers in the process. So comes about the commendably hard-earned healing of the Civil War rift; when Tony hands Steve his iconic shield, it feels quietly momentous. The rest of Act One is thus allowed more light to contrast the shade, a significant amount of it due to Paul Rudd's always endearing Scott Lang (that's once he's absorbed his own sense of trauma at being sprung via random rodent back into a world he scarcely recognises). Despite all the fun to be had with time-travel tropes, however, this story is still primarily about working through grief and failure. Or - as the old team gradually reunites - struggling to. 

Hawkeye has reverted to pure kill-mode and his inner desolation is written into Jeremy Renner's face. Thor has resorted to an appropriately Viking form of alcoholism among the remnants of his Asgardian brethren, Chris Hemsworth portraying it with a pitch-perfect marrying of humour and pathos. (I had reservations about the fat-suit comedy, but the big Aussie sells it by letting that deep-seated pain leak out of his eyes to mitigate the slapstick.) Bruce Banner meanwhile has fared better, investing all his energy in resolving his big green inner conflict, so finally we witness the giant rendered gentle. He, more than anyone, seems to have embraced a way of moving on in his endearing Professor Hulk persona. But he's only moved so far, despite high-fives with his young new fan-club. All these characters - our 2012 Avengers core along with a ragtag selection of the newer lot - are ultimately consumed by that super-impulse to make things right.

Which takes us, via a whole lot of sweat and striving, to Act Two and the Enacting of the Big Plan. Grief has had its day and now it's time for heroic action - less of the slam-bang variety and more the kind requiring ingenuity and subterfuge. I actually love that it's taken a virtually punch-free hour to get to this point. I also love that the writers provide just enough explanation - short of going all Basil Exposition on us - to make sense of time travel MCU-style. (It honestly does all hold up better than Back to the Future for the most part.) As for their moment of zipping off into the Quantum Realm ('See you in a minute' - oh Natasha, if we'd only known), it has proper dramatic weight to it, as opposed to some quick-fix cobbled together in a few minutes of screen time. There's hope now, but it's the desperate kind that could be derailed by any one of numerous potential slip-ups.

The number of time travel locations used here is perfect - and a great contrast of moods and movies-revisited. (Well done writers, for having pinpointed three infinity stones in New York 2012 - keeps things neat.) The action is easy to follow as well; New York, Asgard, Vormir, Morag and Shield H.Q. circa 1970 boast a varied array of production design and colour palettes, so mentally you make an easy switch between the locations. And in genre terms each has a different story to tell. 

New York is the caper movie, aptly so, since it can hark back to the sheer exhilaration of the Avengers denouement - the time we got to see this whole band smashing through an extra-terrestrial army, working for the first time in joyous union. Many of the film's best visual gags are here along with a fistful of air-punch moments and they come as a relief after the gloom that's gone before. 'Hail Hydra', 'America's ass' and Grumpy-Hulk's accidental scuppering of the tesseract heist all inject escapist fun back into the proceedings, while the vision of Captain America fighting himself with the well-choreographed heft that the Russos brought to his franchise is pure fan-service gold. (How does 2019 Cap gain an advantage? By using his future-knowledge of Bucky Barnes' survival to distract. Now that is clever writing. The use of the character's much-discussed costume evolution is masterful storytelling too.) 

Of course all this levity is leavened with cutaways to other mini-movies. It makes sense of course that the Ancient One provide all the time-travelly expo in scenes that draw visually on Doctor Strange. The temporal intricacies we can work out for ourselves post-credits (believe me I did); Tilda Swinton's discussion with Mark Ruffolo give us just enough to work with here. Meanwhile Thor and Rocket are off redeeming The Dark World; how fortuitous that writers Markus and McFeely get to revisit one of the MCU's least-loved films in what has become one of the shared universe's most highly praised. The Shakespearian vibe of old Asgard is lent some of the Ragnarok humour that Taika Waititi brough to Thor's character, with even Renee Russo getting in on the act as the Thunder God's mum. Plus the unlikely Thor/Rocket friendship has proved a deep source of humour and heartbreak, so it's a no-brainer to mine it for some more. (Plot point recap - I worried about Thor divesting that timeline of the hammer it needed to defeat the Ice Elves, but all that got sorted out when Cap returned the Reality Stone, right? Relax. Course it did.)

The mid-section tragedy is played out on Vormir, a planet from which no soul returns. True - Endgame gives us back Gamora as a character, providing Zoe Saldana with another bite of the MCU cherry, but it's not the version we followed through three other movies; the significance of the character's death in Infinity War therefore still holds. Likewise Natasha Romanoff isn't coming back aside from in the delayed Black Widow prequel, however much Bruce Banner willed it when he later wore the gauntlet. (It's further props to the writing team for limiting the Stones' power and not reversing the noble sacrifice that our core Avenger makes here.) The scene has a dark beauty to it and is played for all the humanity it's worth by Johansson and Renner; you thought along with me that Hawkeye was going to take it for the team over his high-kicking bestie, didn't you? But then he wouldn't have had that payoff moment with his family later on. Yes it sucks that as a single gal Natasha wore less plot armour, but then she had been set up years before as someone with debts to settle and here she pays them all off with interest. Plus her connection with various members of the team made for a weightier punch when not everyone returned safely from their Quantum adventure. RIP Nat - see you in the future when you team up with Florence Pugh and co in the past.

The mid-section teariness, it should be said, isn't limited to Black Widow's self-sacrificial sign-off. Tony and Steve are both allowed poignant moments when they visit 1970, plus older viewers get a callback to Michael Douglas in his The Streets of San Francisco days. Of course they've been setting up a Cap/Peggy Carter reunion from the film's early scenes - all those pocket-watch glimpses of Steve's late love-interest - and here they tease it some more, letting us think they're just massaging a bit more salt into Cap's wounds. The lingering encounter between Stark father and son is given more time, due to the fact that it provides an unexpected character resolution. In Civil War Tony only had the virtual version of his dad - here, courtesy of quantum, he gets the real thing. The scenes are some of the film's most heart-warming, not least due to the sensitive playing of Robert Downey Jnr and John Slattery. There's also a crucial life lesson passed on (unknowingly) from father to son - that ultimately the greater good must win out over self-interest. It's one that seems to stick, considering later events. Hey, who knew that we and Tony needed this encounter that much? That'd be the veteran writing team of four MCU greatest hits. If there's one thing they do well in this movie - and there are a few of those - it's closure.

But even as this Starkian ghost is laid to rest, there's a banger of a third act brewing elsewhere. In case the Infinity quest wasn't trial enough for our heroes, a younger, less philosophical Thanos has rumbled their plans and is counter-plotting. This is another temporal mind-bender, not least because it gives us pre-Guardians Gamora and the version of Nebula that's still to learn about empathy. It's the tricksiest part of the whole narrative and one that I only fully appreciated on a second (and third) viewing. This  bravura spanner-in-the-works twist is the stuff of writers who really have the measure of their story. It also gives Karen Gillan room to shine with which she simply hasn't been gifted before; which of us went in expecting that the metallic-blue gal would be be one of the stand-outs? She totally is, however, getting to deliver a nuanced double-portrait of the MCU character who has arguably evolved the furthest. And thank goodness there aren't any Marty McFly-style time reverberations when one version of herself offs the other down the line.

Enough of such multiverse conundrums. Thanks to a clutch of Pimm-particle quantum leaps, we progress into Act Three - the Ultimate Smackdown. The demands of comic-book movie narrative being what they are, this crowd-pleasing finale was as inevitable as Thanos. But let it be pointed out that the imminent roaring triumph has already come at a noteworthy cost. The original Avengers are down one in number, and one of their most loved at that. (I'm sure I wasn't the only Natasha/Bruce shipper to feel a pang at the crestfallen look on Prof Hulk's face.) Point is they're still reeling from this additional loss, as they conclude their attempt to bring back the missing. Thor's plea that he be the one, thereby redeeming himself, is a Hemsworth high-point, but it's Banner who gets nearly char-grilled in process of using the Infinity Gauntlet. Every step of this journey is a painful one and even the thrilling victory moment of Clint's buzzing cellphone - his newly undusted wife on the other end of the line - is undercut by the Thanos strike, one that properly obliterates Avengers HQ. (I can only assume those quantum suits are seriously blast-resistant.)

The heavy lifting continues as Clint and co try to retrieve the gauntlet from underground, while the alpha Dream Team - Cap, Ironman and Thor - take on the younger-but-ungloved Thanos. Even without mystical enhancement he's a big purple bruiser and does significant damage to them, each blow shot with the crunching authenticity that the Russos first brought to the MCU in The Winter Soldier. True there's everyone's favourite 'Hell yes' moment when Cap proves his surpassing worthiness and comes on strong with Mjolnir, but let's not forget that one spirit-denting contest later his vibranium shield is shattered and he's refastening his circa-1942 helmet with a last-stand kind of weariness. Meanwhile his two buds have been knocked clean out of the three-to-one equation and Thanos' armies are massing ominously behind their leader. And Cap looks properly knackered. Never in blockbuster cinema has a tougher hill been climbed than this, and I'm including Mount Doom in that.

Only at that 'game's up' moment to end them all, do we get a cavalry arrival to match, one heralded with Falcon's 'On your left' (another of the movie's neat Winter Soldier callbacks). It's delivered with flair courtesy of Doctor Strange. So layered has the world building been over the MCU's first decade that fans instantly know what's going on; the visual shorthand is sufficiently well-realised that they (make that 'we') just get to sit back and bask in it all. What follows owes a lot, let it be said, to The Lord of the Rings, both in terms of scope and ambition, and in how the action barrage is interspersed with neatly realised character moments. Pretty much all of the latter - be it Tony Stark's embracing of Peter Parker, Scarlet Witch's one-on-one with Thanos or Peter Quill's sort-of reunion with Gamora - succeed, because they've been set up with such care. All of the fan service on display here has been properly earned, therefore it lands terrifically well. Other moments underscore what the MCU is evolving into in terms of its diversity; it's appropriate, following the rapturous welcome of 2018's Black Panther, that T'Challa and co were the first to appear out of Stephen Strange's 'yellow sparkly things', while the miraculous appearance of all the super-gals to help out Spidey is an audacious gender-balancing celebration. (True it'll piss off a more reactionary element of the fan base, but - well - that's part of what makes it so great.)

As for Ironman's finger-snap finale, it's the perfect coup de grace. How exactly does his Stark tech extract the Infinity Stones from Thanos' gauntlet, let alone contain them long enough to let him milk the moment before carrying out the snap? Not sure, don't care. It's a precision-tooled character moment and the ultimate MCU callback. With Black Widow already having made that ultimate sacrifice, it's fitting - however many hearts it breaks along with Peter's and Pepper's - that our favourite flawed egotist do the same. By then Thanos is dust in the wind and we've already forgotten him. We're there standing around Tony in his final moments, assuring him that all will be well. And for those who voiced concern that the momentous events of Infinity War would be undone like they didn't matter, their fears are laid to rest along with him. The stakes never lessened, the sense of drama remained satisfyingly intact throughout and ultimately a hefty price was paid. Thank you writers, thank you Tony. 

It's commendable too how much gets wrapped up in the final ten minutes or so of the film. No disrespect intended to my beloved Lord of the Rings (requirements of the source material and all), but this is textbook how-to-do-an-ending. Think of all that happens in this brief amount of screen time. Tony is celebrated, properly, and we're assured that little Morgan will be okay. ('Cheeseburgers' are a metaphor for love here.) Natasha and poor old Vision are both mourned. Hawkeye's PTSD is soothed by the loving embraces of his family. Peter P has a warm reunion with Ned, who conveniently hasn't aged five years. Thor passes his Asgardian mantle to Valkyrie and zooms off into Space where he'll no doubt regain his original Hemsworthy physique doing competitive reps with Peter Quill. (Starlord update - he's now got the younger model of Gamora on his mind.) And Bucky Barnes' Wakandan rehab has him looking much better. As for Cap, he tidies up all the timelines (or does he?), passes on a restored shield to ultimate wingman Sam and settles back to enjoy the sweet memories of a life finally lived out with Peggy C. 

Look, I'm aware that final revelation throws up enough questions to make a fan's head spin. Having given Endgame that First Anniversary re-watch, however, I've decided that the whole thing dovetails so sweetly in terms of pure drama that all head-scratchers are best set aside to be answered (or not) down the line. There's a time and a place for exposition and the team at the heart of the Infinity Saga knew better than to swamp us with it here. Implications of the five-year snap gap? The Spider-Man: Far From Home guys can deal with all that (and they do). In which reality has Steve Rogers been hanging out with his main '40s squeeze? Don't worry about it - just enjoy that they finally got to slow-dance to a swing classic. It's poetic and it's beautiful - the last in an impressive list of great writer/directorial choices.

Well almost the last. This is the first time I've willed it that there be no mid or end-credit scenes in an MCU movie and thankfully there aren't. We all knew while watching that Spider-Man, Black Panther and others would be back on screens big or small, along with a slew of new untested supers. Kevin Feige and his fellow-creatives have plans we already know to be huge, but that's for another time. The original gang, the one that coalesced in NYC 2012, needed a swansong, and that they were most definitively given. Roll those credits, sign off, fade to black. These old-guard Avengers assembled for one final pushback against evil - and gave us the blockbuster event of a generation. We love them for it - and we all know exactly how much.