Marvel Studios. 2023. Adventure. 105 min.
Grade: 2 out of 4
Once upon a time, The Marvels, as choppy, muddled, and confused as it is, might have been greeted as warmly as 2015’s Ant-Man, the low stakes palette cleanser we needed after the punishing Avengers: Age of Ultron, released just two and a half months earlier. Of course, 2015 was well before the glut of Marvel TV series, movies, short films, mid-credit scenes, comic books, cereal box tops, and matchbook covers one must be familiar with to fully understand something like The Marvels, which comes at a fraught time in the history of the MCU.
You heard it here last, but after Marvel Studios’ truly wonderous achievement up through Avengers: Endgame, the MCU is now a multi-headed behemoth of mediocre content that assumes viewers have a bottomless appetite for anything Marvel and would pay monthly streaming service fees and purchase bi-annual movie tickets to not be left behind. As the wavering grosses of the films and the ho-hum reception of the last couple of Disney+ series have proven, more content means less quality control and as each successive project makes the whole enterprise less special, even the most diehard fans have become disinterested in keeping up with the Avengers. The ultimate expression of the trap that Marvel, through its combination of success, greed, and hubris, set for itself and then inevitably fell into is The Marvels.
Not content to make a straight sequel to 2019’s overpraised Captain Marvel, corporate imperatives have burdened Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) with playing the nominal lead in a superheroic Charlie’s Angels, teaming her with Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) from the Disney+ series WandaVision and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) from the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel in a story that, at a minimum, would require a re-watching of Captain Marvel, but would also benefit from a look-see (or just read its Wikipedia plot synopsis) at the underwhelming Disney+ series, Secret Invasion.
If, before its first frame, The Marvels is already weighed down by previous movie and TV installments whose crisscrossing multiverse plotlines have melted into one indecipherable and aimless glob, Nia DaCosta, Megan McDonnell, and Elissa Karasik’s script does little to smooth things out. The movie is a jumble of personal and interpersonal conflicts, tiresome talk of quantum bands and jump points, and left field attempts at humor that play like discarded ideas from the Guardians of the Galaxy series. The movie is so beholden to the past, present, and future of the overarching franchise that it misuses its best asset: its central trio of superheroes. Since the barely remembered events of her 2019 film, Captain Marvel has gone from kick-ass former Air Force pilot to lonely, Croc-wearing space jockey with lingering regrets about helping the Skrulls defeat the Kree, or possibly helping the Kree defeat the Skrulls, I can’t remember. She’s also estranged from her niece Monica who has not seen Carol in years and holds a grudge against her for not returning since she was a child. Their estrangement and its inevitable resolution are smothered in other storytelling concerns that also detract from the only character in this thing worth caring about: Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) is a Pakistani-American teenager fighting crime in Jersey City, New Jersey as Ms. Marvel. She’s also a hyper-enthusiastic diehard Captain Marvel fangirl who draws homemade comic books chronicling their imaginary adventures as superhero BFF’s. Vellani is a delight, letting some much-needed air into a film that will inevitably have to knuckle down and focus on its villain du jour.
These Marvel villains have become so forgettably one-and-done (with the exception of Thanos and possibly Kang, it’s too early to tell on that one) that not even Thor: Love and Thunder’s Christian Bale lingered in the mind after the end credits. In The Marvels, Carol, Monica, and Kamala must team up to defeat a Kree villain named Dar-Benn, played by Zawe Ashton who tries her wild-eyed best to make standard villain dialogue about conquering and destroying sound different from the dozens of other Marvel villains hellbent on conquering and destroying. The action gets rolling immediately as Dar-Benn unearths the first in a pair of long sought-after bracelets that will give her enough power to extract revenge against Carol, whom she blames for the desolation of her home world. The second bracelet happens to be on the wrist of Kamala, and Dar-Benn will do anything to obtain it.
Getting our three heroes together involves a bunch of comic book gobbledygook about malfunctioning jump points and results in Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel, and Monica (who doesn’t like any of the suggested superhero code names) swapping places whenever they use their light-based powers simultaneously which becomes inconvenient—if chuckle-worthy—during the energetically staged fights. Some of this is the unfortunate byproduct of what directors Taika Waititi and James Gunn brought to the Thor and Guardians series, respectively. The idea that every Marvel film will benefit from a surprise dose of winking absurdity is, in itself, absurd and it certainly doesn’t fit here. At one point, the trio land on a planet where everyone speaks in song and where, in a WTF info dump, Carol reveals she’s in a marriage of convenience with one of its warbling citizens, played by Korean actor Park Seo-joon. Later, a herd of adorable kittens saves the day to the song Memory from the musical Cats, another forced bit of comedy that might have been funny in a script meeting but comes across as a new and unwanted addition to the Marvel formula.
Aside from the enthusiastic Vellani, the central performances are rather dutiful. Larson’s portrayal of guilt over Captain Marvel’s actions reads more as if she quickly woke up from a nap to address the issue, while Samuel L. Jackson appears for no other reason than he’s Samuel L. Jackson, ably soldiering through his 12th Marvel film as Nick Fury. Director DaCosta (Candyman) keeps things moving brisky but not so fast that the plot holes, unanswered questions, and “just go with it” explanations don’t bog it all down. And that’s also the problem with the MCU as a whole; it’s too weighed down by its interconnectedness and disturbing sense that not even all-powerful Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige knows where it’s all going. Buried somewhere within The Marvels is a breezy and fun girl power adventure. Otherwise, it’s merely another sloppy and over-plotted grain of sand on Marvel’s increasingly polluted beach that furthers our opinion that the studio has lost its exalted place within pop culture and, as a moviemaking concern, has increasingly lost its way.