You never want to be the last person at the party. Whether you lost track of time because you were having so much fun, or if your plan was to stick around long enough for the good drugs to come out, now it’s just you and the host, and it’s awkward. That’s what The Marvels feels like.
The best thing about the sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel is that it’s only 105 minutes long, although it seems longer. Twice, the film pauses for flashbacks to other Marvel properties in a vain attempt to make the audience care about what’s happening onscreen. Things got pretty rough on Hala after Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel (Brie Larson, hair fabulous), destroyed the Supreme Intelligence, an AI which ruled the Kree Empire. Now, a new Kree leader has emerged, Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), who retrieves a legendary Quantum Band from deep beneath her planet, which gives her vast and narratively undefined powers. But Quantum Bands come in pairs, and the other one belongs to Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), aka Ms. Marvel, a South Asian teenager from New Jersey who apparently had a TV show on Disney+. Kamala is a cartoonist who idolizes Captain Marvel so much she plagiarized the name, and for a brief sequence, her doodles come to life. The quaint little hand-drawn animation sequence screams, “We know you would rather be watching that cool animated Spider-Man movie.”
That’s the flaccid flavor of The Marvels, which is basically just a bunch of warmed-over bits and pieces of things you might remember enjoying in the past, stuck together with little regard for narrative coherence. When Dar-Benn tries to use her newfound power to open permanent interstellar wormholes, big enough to do things like fly a conquering starfleet or steal a planet’s worth of water, both Captain Marvel and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) are sent to investigate. Space-time shenanigans ensue that leave Kamala, Monica, and Carol switching places whenever they use their powers.
You might be thinking, “Oh, like Freaky Friday, where two people’s personalities switch bodies? It’s fun to watch two actors switch characters!” Alas, no. In this case, the quantum entangled bodies physically switch places. Instead of mining the premise for fun comedy bits, the three actors just scream and flail around a lot. The permutations are used up quickly. What if Captain Marvel, who can fly, switches places with Kamala, who can’t fly, while she’s flying? What if they switch places while they’re both fighting Kree assassins? Could the problem be solved with a training montage? (Also, that’s not how quantum entanglement works.)
Dar-Benn is using the wormholes to steal the resources her dying planet needs from places that have an emotional connection to Captain Marvel, who her people rightly call The Annihilator. That’s how we get to Aladna, the musical theater planet, where everyone communicates via song and dance. This rejected Rick and Morty gag would be remembered as a new nadir for Marvel Studios if, a few minutes later, we were not treated to a scene set to “Memory” from the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical Cats, where feline-shaped Flerken eat everyone on Nick Fury’s (Samuel L. Jackson) space station. Don’t worry, it’s for their own good.
No film epitomized Marvel’s bland corporate competence better than Captain Marvel. The MCU’s high floor/low ceiling was excusable when it felt like Kevin Feige was going somewhere with all of it. After the big payoff of Avengers: Endgame, the Marvel films have been treading water. Now, our favorites like Robert Downey Jr. and Scarlett Johansson are off counting their money, the plots are nonsense, and the shoddy CGI is showing. Find your coat and call a Lyft, this party is over.
The Marvels
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