Avengers: The infinite wait to 2019

The villain Thanos brought to life by actor Josh Brolin.

“Bitin” was my reaction to “Avengers: Infinity War,” Marvel Studios’ latest franchise hit. A cliffhanger.

Given the Hollywood formula these days where franchise movies are done over several years, why would the Avengers be any different?

That tactic of squeezing these movies for all their worth commercially is par for the course.
Come to think of it, there were eight Harry Potter movies, the Star Wars series has done eight, and a 9th flick will be out on December 20, 2019, and they have been remaking Star Trek for God knows how long. I can’t even remember how many Spiderman reboots there have been since Tobey Maguire kicked off the webslinger. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 will be coming out in 2020 while John Wick 3 is being released a year from now.

But we digress.

The irony of the Avengers is I never followed them very much when growing up. It was Superman and Batman. Maybe a bit of the Green Lantern, Flash and the X-Men.

But DC is late to the game of turning them into box office hits so Avenger heroes like Captain America, the Hulk, Thor and Iron Man have dominated the superhero franchise scene.

The Justice League is good especially when they resurrected Superman, but it was a somewhat stale version when compared to the buzz of a massive Avengers flick.

The latest Avengers movie is over-the-top fun from the opening sequence to the last, when half the heroes are turned literally into dust by a gravelly bad guy hunk called Thanos, played letter-perfect by Josh Brolin — aka Cable in Deadpool 2, George Bush, the young agent K in Men in Black 3 (another franchise series) and the snarling Jonah Hex.

Resurrecting the Avengers superheroes…in the next flick?

Marvel and Disney have always been good in making sure the writing of these superhero movies does not degenerate into farcical lines that undermine the franchise. The dialogue is crisp and the jokes are not lame or forced. They are part of the movie’s flow and ebb so that one’s attention does not waver or drifts away from pure boredom.

One caveat though.

This movie is really for the fan of these comic book characters. The movie’s makers embarked on a massive presumption that you have been watching all the other Marvel movies over the past decade so you can easily pick up the story lines in Infinity War.

If you have not been watching these movies regularly, it may be a little tough to pick up the plot as the movie jumps from the Guardian characters to Thor and his brother Loki and then to Vision and Doctor Strange – and how they are all connected.

The only thing I really did not like is precisely the way the movie ended – which is ‘bitin’ in that the story will need a sequel because we can’t let the bad guy win. That will feature all the major heroes who were turned into dust coming back to life.

But that’s a minor quibble since I waited with my daughter every year or so for the Potter movies and am now eagerly waiting for Star Wars 9.

Do these movies remind me of my childhood? Yes. That’s more than half the fun in following them, even now that I’m closer to 60 than 16.

© The FilAm 2018