Directed by: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo
Starring: Josh Brolin, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, Tom Holland, Anthony Mackie, Chadwick Boseman, Danai Gurira, Letitia Wright, Sebastian Stan, Scarlett Johansson, Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Dave Bautista, Pom Klementieff, Vin Diesel, Don Cheadle, Peter Dinklage, Karen Gillan, Tom Hiddleston, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Gwyneth Paltrow, Benicio del Toro, William Hurt
Rated PG-13, 149 minutes
Look, I know what you’re thinking—you can’t list 29 actors on the “starring” line; that’s outrageous! If it’s an ensemble film, just list the three or four actors who have the most lines, and leave it at that. But I can’t do that, because that would misrepresent “Avengers: Infinity War” and its unapologetic maximalism. Sure, Josh Brolin and Robert Downey Jr. might get the most screen time, but make no mistake: In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, every single superhero and supervillain is unquestionably a star.
Despite the overwhelming smorgasbord of a cast, the storyline of “Infinity War” is relatively simple: The evil demigod Thanos (Brolin) has set out to collect the six Infinity Stones, each of which grants its bearer the ability to control one piece of the universe—power, time, reality, and so on. Together, all six stones would give their owner absolute control over the universe, which Thanos wants in order to finally make his dreams of good schools, fair tax brackets, affordable housing, bridge repairs, municipal broadband networks, and public works projects a reality.
Well, sort of. Thanos does want everyone to be happy, but the way he’s going to achieve that is by using the Infinity Stones to kill off half of the living beings in the universe with one snap of his fingers, so that the resources of the universe won’t have to stretch so far. Economics!
All of which is fine and dandy, except for those pesky Avengers, the superheroes who keep showing up to slap the stones out of Thanos’s big, pudgy fingers. These guys are everywhere! Which is probably easy, since there are so many of them—so many, in fact, that they quickly become redundant. Consider Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, featured at the very center of the movie poster, but who shows up to throw about one punch and then retreats while Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch hurls some streaky red lights from her hands. Teamwork is great and all, but as the saying goes, too many cooks will spoil the broth.
It’s not that the heaping helping of celebrities makes the movie bad—the movie actually picks up the pace considerably once all the introductions are out of the way (which, granted, takes about an hour)—but they dilute its impact. “Avengers: Infinity War” is like an all-you-can-eat buffet that gives out bathtubs instead of dinner plates; why settle for more reasonably sized portions one at a time when you could throw everything, literally everything, together all at once?
The irony is that all this overindulgence in putting familiar faces on the screen makes Thanos, with his insipid “for the greater good” villainy, the closest thing this movie has to a protagonist. Every scene, every battle, every new planet the characters go to—it’s all because of where Thanos is going and what he’s doing. And after enough of these battles between him and the two dozen celebrity superheroes trying to stop him, his plot to cull populations starts to make some sense.
But the thing that ultimately makes “Infinity War” such a tiresome movie to sit through is not its overstuffed cast, or its bevy of generic-brand hero monologues, or the crocodile tear performances from its cast. I expected all of that; what comes as a surprise is just how little fun the movie is. “Infinity War” is an action movie designed by committee, a film made less with instinct and aesthetic and vigor than with focus groups and calculations. The actors are not so much people as they are bodies in some loosely coherent action-figure bonanza. That there are so many of them is not evidence of the movie’s majestic enormity, as it tries to sell us, but rather is testament to the hollowness of a story wherein everyone is the hero and everything is always at stake. To paraphrase a much better movie about superheroes, when everyone’s super, no one is.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 5/11/18.