By Richard Roeper

I’m not prepared to instantly label “Avengers: Endgame” as the best of the 23 Marvel Universe movies to date, but it’s a serious contender for the crown, and it’s the undisputed champion when it comes to emotional punch.

If you don’t feel the tears welling up multiple times during this screen-filling, eye-popping, time-hopping, pulse-pounding, beautifully filmed superhero adventure for the ages, check for a pulse – because you might be dead.

So much hype has swirled for so long in advance of this sure-to-crack-$2-billion-worldwide insta-hit, you might have been wondering if even the combined powers of Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Black Widow, the Hulk, Captain America et al., would be strong enough to hold up under such an avalanche of expectations.

Not to worry. They got this.

Thanks to a funny, well-paced, smart, expertly rendered screenplay by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely; crisp direction from Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, who pull off the otherworldly feat of juggling a myriad of story arcs and a hall of fame lineup bursting with well over a dozen beloved superhero characters; and the universally stellar performances from a cast filled with Oscar winners, Oscar nominees and charismatic stars on the rise, “Avengers: Endgame” actually breezes through its nearly three-hour running time with nary a dull moment or a stumble in plot development.

“Endgame” begins with the first of many small, intimate, human family moments, involving one of the Avengers and his family in the moments just before (“Avengers: Infinity War” spoiler alert!) Thanos snapped his fingers and made half the inhabitants of the entire universe, including many of our favorite superheroes, disappear in clouds of swirling black ash.

From there we cut to a core group of surviving Avengers, including Steve Rogers/Captain America (Chris Evans), Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), James Rhodes/War Machine (Don Cheadle) and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), who don’t look or sound anything like mighty warriors as they despair over their losses and wonder if they have any purpose in this new and devastated world.

Eventually we catch up with Tony Stark/Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Scott Lang/Ant-Man (Paul Rudd), Clint Barton/Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and Thor/He’s Just Always Thor (Chris Hemsworth), each of whom has traveled a unique journey – one finding a measure of peace in a post-superhero life, another utterly lost but eager to get back in the game, another fueled by an unquenchable thirst for vengeance, and another who has let himself go and spends his days guzzling beer and playing video games. I’ll leave it to you to discover the particulars.

It’s Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man and his experiences with all that “quantum realm” scientific jazz, who comes up with a seemingly impossible proposition: Why don’t they expand on Ant-Man’s experience and take it to the next level? Like, go back in time to before Thanos accumulated all six Infinity Stones and festooned them to an Infinity Gauntlet, stop him from acquiring the Stones, and that way he’ll never have the opportunity to snap his fingers.

This leads to a bounty of jokes about “Back to the Future” and other time-traveling movies, and then “Endgame” actually becomes a “Back to the Future”-type adventure, that is, if Marty McFly could actually McFly and he was joined on his time-hopping missions by all sorts of superheroes on multiple planets.