Call it superhero super-saturation. Or Marvel overload. Some moviegoers (mostly sub-teen boys) will eat this up. For the record, I’ve been a Marvel Comics fan since the ’60s. I couldn’t wait for it to end. The impressive team of A-listers has little to do but support the ubiquitous special effects.

In 2012’s The Avengers, writer/director Joss Whedon’s motley band of superheroes, when they weren’t battling bad guys or each other, were at their best in “down time” scenes where they kicked back, had a beer, and traded a few barbs. But there’s little time for that in this overstuffed, soulless sequel, what with seven-plus super-story updates to slog through, several extraneous subplots, endless, mind-numbingly repetitive, computer-generated battle set pieces, pop-psychological musings, and a general lack of wonder. Not even Robert Downey Jr. can pep it up.

More frenzied than fun, and so noisy, it kept waking me up. On top of that, the titular super-villain is a rather generic construct, a disturbed three-meter super-robot whose undeniably effective plan to achieve peace in the world involves removing all the humans from it. Yawn. To be fair, the film struggles against the increasingly dull Marvel template, just not all that hard. (141 min)