Sunday, April 29, 2018

Avengers: Infinity War


Avengers: Infinity War landed on movie screens this weekend. Guess my response.

Spoiler Alert:





















No, really, I'm not kidding. Spoilers.























Marvel, which stumbled (though making out financially like bandits) with Black Panther, marking the end of unbroken successes since the Avengers' prequels started over a decade and change ago, is now fully in the grip of the Disney @$$holes who killed the Star Wars franchise with the last (wait, two...no, three) utterly franchise-killing atrocious movies.

This Avengers' outing, in a script that must have been vetted by Paul Ehrlich himself, is the World Series where a bomb goes off in the eighth inning of Game One, and wipes out half the favored team.
Good luck selling tickets for the next game.
It's the Rocky sequel where Sylvester Stallone gets into the ring, gets a head shot, and dies of a brain aneurysm in the second round, kicking and twitching on the canvas, right in the middle of the movie.

If Mel Gibson had done Braveheart like this, he would have opened with the final scene, then just shown Longshanks raping the Scots for two hours, like Marvel did to the audience in this two-and-half-hour set-up to getting cornholed by Marvel like Tim Roth did to Jessica Lange in Rob Roy (which was R-rated for a reason):



Audiences haven't been butt-f**ked this hard just to blatantly milk a sequel cash cow till it bleeds since the ending of The Empire Strikes Back.

Actually, this is worse than that.

Punish the sonsofbitches who foisted this horseshit on an audience, and
STAY HOME.

Some of you, like the yuuuuuuuuuuuuuge audiences for this thing this weekend, won't listen to that. Seeing this evil craptastic sequel-bait p.o.s. for yourself will be its own reward, and its own punishment.

What do I mean?
The Avengers lose damned near every fight in the movie.
Then, they lose at the end.

Half of them are wiped out, dead.

The list of those who get whacked in this flick is prodigious.
Loki.
Everybody fleeing Asgaard.
Gamora.
Vision.
Dr. Strange.
Groot.
Star Lord.
Mantis.
Drax.
Spiderman.

Bucky Barnes.
Red Witch.
Falcon.
T'Challa.
Black Panther.
Nick Fury.
Agent Hill.

All deader than canned tuna.

Oh, and half the population of the universe.

Sam Jackson's absolute last line in the whole movie, "Motherfu..." summed up audience response pretty perfectly.

Oh, and Hulk has projectile dysfunction after getting his ass beat in the opening scene, and never gets it together for the rest of the movie. Only with the help of a Tony Stark workaround does he finally manage to pull off a half-assed Pedro Serrano "F**k you, Jobu, I do it myself!" lame semi-comeback, before they all choke hard, and get soundly thrashed by the villain in the ultimate battle.

Fury and Hill eat it in the lone easter egg, at the very last second after the credits.
With some cryptic pager logo as the only tease as to how they'll pull some recockulous deus ex machina solution out of their asses in the next movie or three.

(Too late, you've already pulled me out of the movie, and the entire franchise, jackholes.)

Or else, they're going to save one helluva lot on payroll, after killing off half the talent list forever.

The last time we saw an ending this shitty for one side, the loser was Walter Mondale.

The packed midnight show on the second night of the weekend was phenomenal, considering the thing was playing on 15 of 25 screens, sold out through 11PM shows when I bought tickets for it at 8PM, and the parking lot was jam packed like I haven't seen for a movie since May of 1977, for some George Lucas sci-fi flick about some lost robots on a desert planet.

That same audience sat in stunned silence to the entire end of the credits, in an atmosphere best described as funereal.
The last time I saw an audience this thoroughly depressed at the end was the fans rooting for the Russian hockey team at the 1980 Olympics. Or maybe for the Bobby Kennedy victory party in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel, I can't say which.

After this execreble offering, Disney shares should plummet, and I hope movie-goers with torches and pitchforks storm the studio gates Monday, and demand heads. Tar-and-feathering, at a minimum. (And I'm talking hot tar on bare skin, none of that room-temperature sticky roof patch b.s.)

This sort of betrayal was utter bullshit, and I hope their Marvel sequels all do as well as The Lone Ranger from here on out.
As it is, they'll make metric buttloads of cash this weekend, but I can hope against hope word-of-mouth about this enormous dung-ball kills it off in a couple of weeks.
They thoroughly deserve that, until they apologize for this shitastic stunt.

From now on, they could put strippers and live executions in the opening credits, and the whole franchise is still dead to me.


You've been warned.

And after the trailers, I was looking forward to Ant-Man and The Wasp.
The only way I'm seeing it now is when they send me a free copy in the mail, by way of apologizing for this weekend's monstrous fuck-up.

Like that'll ever happen.
Adios, Marvel.
It was fun while it lasted.

My rating:
Flush twice, this is a monster load, and will overwhelm a low-flush toilet.

13 comments:

Don Curton said...

No, really. Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel. Cause it sounds like you're sugar-coating it a little bit and it may be even worse than what you're telling us.

James M Dakin said...

Nowadays, when they say "best show of the year", they mean ONLY good show the whole year. When RedBox offers me a rent one/one free, almost never is there even a first let alone second movie worth watching ( I was actually impressed how well they did with "Den Of Thieves" ). How do you spend $200 million and forget to include a decent script? I haven't been to the theatre since Brad Pitt was driving a tank around, and that one was marginal. The last movie I enjoyed at the theatre was World War Z. And that was just a popcorn movie. The last movie I saw twice in a theatre was Independence Day ( the original ). Hey, why do they need 'Muricans to go to the theatre. They have the Chinese now. Bastards. Okay, I'll stop now.

Aesop said...

@Donald
Trust me, this was indeed the toned-down version.

T-Rav said...

Ouch.

I saw it yesterday evening, and I had a much different reaction.

There is no way in hell, unless an EMP fries the power grid in the next twelve months, that any of those people are going to stay dead. (Well, Loki might since that was at the very beginning.) Spider-Man, Black Panther, and the Guardians, among others, already have sequels lined up, and Marvel was never going to let them stay dead. So my guess is the surviving heroes are going to "fix" the timeline somehow, possibly by getting the Infinity Gauntlet away from Thanos, and using the Timestone (?) to hit the rewind button.

I didn't enjoy watching all of them die, even so. But I can understand the decision from the writers' point of view. The Ultron movie sucked because no one cared about Ultron as a villain, and there was never any doubt the Avengers would beat him. This was at least different because Thanos is definitely a villain they can lose to. I don't know if that makes it a "good" movie, but...it's different, at least.

Baldrick said...

The deus ex machina will be Captain Marvel (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4154664/). That's what was on the pager at the end credit scene - her symbol. Just like every other movie being put out by this studio, the woman saves the day. That's cool, I'm a woman, but it's feeling shoehorned and contrived now.

Kind of like not giving Rey a proper backstory (or changing it up with directors... Lor San Tekka being on Jakku was not supposed to be coincidental at the beginning, I think) - there's just no coherence anymore except to advance the "GRRL POWER! agenda. I could write better stuff right after taking a strong blow to the head.

Dovetails in nicely with UT treating masculinity as a mental health issue (https://pjmedia.com/trending/university-of-texas-to-treat-masculinity-as-a-mental-health-issue/). Take away strong male role models entirely or have them play hapless idiots like they have done on TV for the past 10 years, make all heroes women, and soon you'll end up with a civilization that's easier to destroy. (See: The UK and Sweden, where man have been emasculated for longer.) No core family units, anything cohesive coming apart, like I said, it's right out of a playbook somewhere... hmm...

Anyhow, we're in for another "STRONG WOMYN SAVES THE DAY!" script that's been put in use for the past while. I think I'll skip it. As a woman, I prefer strong male leads to be honest. I didn't read or watch 50 Shades, but I know the outline, and there's a reason it was so popular. Normal women like strong leading men.

Meanwhile Loki probably won't be back regardless - Hiddleston is very hot property in Hollywood at this point who can take leads himself, and I think he's done with the role. Possibly the same for Cumberbatch, so Dr. Strange may be nixed for all time too. Bu they do like money, so we'll see. I really think Loki is done though. I can't see Hiddleston doing anything but leads while the big money's there now.

This is why I prefer Deadpool. At least I laugh. This is was just... bleh.

Papa said...

They'll resurrect them in another cash sucking series of movies.
Like when Superman was stupidly killed, then brought back to life in a dumber sequel.
Thanks for saving me admission money.

MMinWA said...

I am so unplugged from this stuff that I don't know anything you're talking about, IOW the spoilers didn't spoil anything.

With all of the other pots you have simmering, really, how many of you are there?

Jonathan H said...

I didn't really plan to see the movie, but you've helped seal it for me.
I haven't seen Captain America Civil War yet but from what I've heard I won't bother.
I haven't seen any of them in the theater, so they haven't made any money from me...

Laughingdog said...

As far as I can tell from reading summaries about Thanos in the actual comics, this isn't that far from the actual comic storyline.

Aesop said...

That would be Lesson #1 in Why Comic Books Aren't Movie Scripts.

Unknownsailor said...

The movie follows the general outline of the comic it is based on, including the Finger Snap.

Comic fans are in awe that they actually did it. They actually let Thanos win.

Captain Marvel is supposed to be the most powerful Avenger of them all, so we will have to see how her movie is written.

Aesop said...

Thank for explaining why it sucked so hard. I was afraid it was just me.

This is why studios shouldn't hand out hundreds of millions of actual greenback dollars to people with the intelligence or business-sense, let alone story construction ability, of pre-teens.

Captain Marvel could be Playmate of the Year, nude in every scene, and I still won't be watching it. They've pissed away the franchise. But it should score huge love from people who couldn't get to reading novels before high school graduation.

If this is where they've decided to go, they should have stayed a comic book company, for the same reason finger painting isn't found among the works of Rembrandt.

Anonymous said...

I can't believe a hardass like you went to see this but I guess we all need some kind of frivolous recreation in our lives. Personally, I hate Hollywood and the pc garbage they spew that I'd rather watch the grass grow.

old bastard