I really enjoyed it, so much that I'm going to watch it again tomorrow (partially so I can see it in 2D instead of 3D, which I didn't want to see it in). It's a stronger Avengers film than
Age of Ultron and handled the conflicted superheros idea far better than
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (everything Snyder did wrong, the Russo Brothers got right). Not only is it one of the better superhero films, it managed to maintain a strong Captain America storyline despite the heavy Avengers-tone. It also builds nicely on the Tony Stark saga.
The airport sequence is excellent with plenty of surprises. The inclusion of Black Panther felt very natural to the overall story and the comedy from Ant-Man and Spider-Man were great.
However, there were a few things that bothered me.
There's a jarring segue where Natasha gives her condolences to Steve after Peggy's funeral in London before heading to Vienna to sign the Sokovia Accords. The bombing happens, followed by a scene showing Steve escorting Sharon back to her hotel. They hear the news of the attack and then sudden both o them and Sam are at the sign of the attack
as people are still reeling from the bombing. Seems like this is a result of a bad edit and it stood out badly to me.
While I liked the idea of Zemo manipulating the whole situation for his own vengeance (a recurrent theme of the film), I found it a bit hard to believe that (as he's portrayed in the film) an ordinary officer of the Sokovian army with no connections to Hydra (unless I missed something) managed to find out about the existence of the Winter Soldier program and was able to know how to follow the tracks to more information on it. Perhaps my second viewing will clarify this issue.
My other major issue with the film is this...
The not so good:
The movie stopping for the spiderman recruitment scene. It interrupted the pace and it seems silly that Stark would fly half way across the world in mid crisis to maybe convince him to come (when they never met before).
I found this even more jarring that the London/Vienna segue. Not only did it mess up the flow of the film and made little in-story sense, it felt very obvious moment of "Hey! We can use Spider-Man! This is where we'll squeeze him in." After all of the press talk about how Peter would be conflicted about what side he would be on and how that provide another layer to the themes of the film (which
was lightly touched on with Natasha), all we got from his appearance was the classic wise cracks while web-slinging. Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it did feel a bit unnecessary and forced.
