Seems to be popular to shit on the new Marvel movies these days. Don’t get me wrong, The Marvels is not up to their usual standards of excellence, but while it does have some troubling elements, there’s still a lot of entertainment there. It’s not complete garbage, no matter what you’ve heard.
The sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel and also relying heavily on the viewer’s knowledge of the Disney+ miniseries WandaVision and Ms Marvel, the film follows the trio of Carol Danvers (Captain Marvel), Monica Rambeau, and Kamala Khan (Ms Marvel). The film’s bad guy, Dar-Benn, is using a magical bangle (identical to the one that Khan found in her show) to rip holes in space to plunder planets of their natural resources. In doing so, she has destabilized light energy. Since Danvers, Rambeau, and Khan’s respective powers all draw from light, their powers have now gone wonky. Whenever any two of them use their powers at the same time, their physical bodies switch places with each other. This leads to lots of comedy in the first third of the film, as they keep swapping whenever each is fighting a bad guy while stranding each other in bad spots. Once they get the hang of it, they are able to put the swaps to good use later on. As they hunt down Dar-Benn and discover her motives, they have to put their combined powers to use to stop her before the rips she creates tear space apart.
The film has some exciting moments, and the action is top notch. There’s also a lot of laughs (the audience at my particular theater was having a really good time, with lots of infectious laughter throughout the film) to break up the seriousness of the danger at times. However, the film falls short in a lot of spots, and most notably, by two of its stars. Brie Larson is honestly awful, and it makes me reconsider her as an actor. I remember her being great in The Room, but that was almost a decade ago, and maybe she’s just a one-hit wonder. It is even more glaring when her costar, Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan, is absolutely wonderful. Her effervescent personality exudes joy, and I found myself focusing on her in every scene. Marvel would do well to do the same in future plans for the franchise. Larson isn’t the only bad one either; Zawe Ashton as the big bad guy Dar-Benn is equally (and completely cringe-worthy) bad, so much so that the two facing off on screen was hard to watch.
Acting aside, there’s also some weird editing, and some plot points/scenes that didn’t add anything at all to the overall picture. Seems like the film was 2 hours until they realized it just wasn’t working, so they started cutting (the final result is about 90 minutes) in hopes of salvaging something. It didn’t completely work. All that being said, as I stated earlier, the movie still has lots of fun and is a general good time, but since I have a habit of throwing out 4 and 5 stars for Marvel films, this one is definitely a letdown. ★★½
Jons Movie Takes 