In 1981, it took a misguided superpowered Rogue to drain the life force from Captain Marvel. In 2023, it was Brie Larson and The Marvels.

The Marvels

When the Kree’s vengeful leader uncovers an ancient artifact of immense power, she will use her newfound might to lay waste to all the places her sworn enemy, Captain Marvel, calls home.

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There has been much ballyhoo surrounding the release of The Marvels, and very little of it any good. From its star Brie Larson’s bitter misandry to the rumors of on-set drama behind the scenes, many expected The Marvels to be a hot mess. Many won’t be disappointed.

No aspect of The Marvels is immune from either a complete lack of attention to detail or talent and often both. In a trend that seems to have started with Disney’s Star Wars: Ahsoka and continued to The Marvels, the film’s ill-fitting and occasionally garish costumes appear to be cosplay rather than something crafted by a multi-billion dollar studio. The practical sets, too, have a plastic and artificial feel that are unaided by CGI establishing shots that appear to have been generated in the year 2000.

Regrettably, the CGI panoramas are not the only digital effects wanting. The Marvels is peppered with moments of laughable greenscreen and a host of poorly rendered scenes. Teyonah Parris’ first flight as Monica Rambeau looks like a homemade fan film lovingly made in someone’s garage. This subpar quality was the soup du jour, with nearly every special effects-laden shot (of which there were many) suffering by varying degrees, though admittedly without reaching The Flash level of incompetence.

That said, the film’s utter lack of technical excellence is far from its greatest weakness. That honor falls to its story and main storyteller, director and head writer, Nia DaCosta, whose directorial feature-length film resume is limited to 2021’s poorly reviewed Candyman reboot. DaCosta seems to lack the most basic understanding of visual storytelling. In Captain Marvel’s first scene, the camera repeatedly and jarringly switches from steady cam to shaky cam and back again from one cut/angle to the next, giving the impression that each angle was shot with a different style in mind. When one wasn’t settled upon, the editor likely had no choice but to stitch it together with catgut and Scotch Tape.

Were bizarre camera decisions the limit of DaCosta’s incompetence, we could all breathe a sigh of relief. Unfortunately, they are not. DaCosta’s script makes her direction look like Fellini in comparison. Mundane and underwhelming, if well-paced, action sequences are almost always bookended by the film’s leading trio standing around and talking about their feelings for minutes so long they still haven’t ended.

Furthermore, every revelation that moves the story along comes to the group and secondary characters not from perseverance and organic discovery but via sudden and inexplicable understanding of the situation garnered by… you guessed it – more talking or by deus ex machina.

The best example of this is the film’s finale (one that was unquestionably pulled out of DaCosta’s rectum). ***SPOILER In it, Parris’ Rambeau is able to look at a colossal space anomaly for a few seconds (without the aid of tools, superpowers, or experience) and completely diagnoses what it is, what has caused it, and what will fix it. Then, she becomes a magic MacGuffin in order to fix it, doing things she’s never done, thought of doing, or should have any clue how to do. ***END SPOILER***

All in all, the film feels like a ten-year-old girl’s fan fiction and is filled with slumber parties, girl-talk, debutante balls, a handsome prince who is in love with the lead, who is also a princess now… because. Oh, and a five-minute musical scene so dumb and out of place that Taika Waititi must have consulted.

Even this hackneyed storytelling could be overlooked if the film’s characters were compelling or even remotely interesting. Iman Vellani, who plays Kamala Khan (aka Ms. Marvel), is both a delightful ball of energy and the only actor in The Marvels having any fun or who has anything approaching a sense of comedic timing or delivery, which could have come in handy had not most of the film’s characters attempted be its comic relief (think lady Ghostbusters).

It’s a shame that DaCosta appears to be as clueless about comedy as she is about nearly every other aspect of filmmaking because Vellani’s comedic strengths are quickly mutated into the cinematic undead stumbling around looking for laughs as the rest of the cast clumsily does a bad impression of a charmingly befuddled 90s Hugh Grant character.

Of the rest of the main trio, Teyonah Parris is serviceable as Monica Rambeau, which is high praise when you consider the material she was working with. This leaves us Brie Larson, who gives the weakest performance of the three. Apparently only capable of two facial expressions, blank and surprised confused concern, Larson is a black hole of charisma that sucks the energy, joy, and drama from the marrow of every scene.

There’s a scene in A Chorus Line in which the lead, a one-time star and now chorus girl, is told to dial it back and to stop adding the little flourishes that once differentiated her from the pack and elevated her to stardom. Unfortunately, Larson has the exact opposite problem, which is only magnified by how obviously hard she is working to be likable in this film. The result is a wooden performance that smells of offputting desperation.

It does nothing to help Larson that neither her character nor the other leads give the audience a sense of the stakes at hand. Captain Marvel is virtually invulnerable, and the other two are so accidentally good at what they do that neither gets so much as a bruise. There is never a sense of impending doom that the trio won’t be able to handle.

In fact, their most significant hurdle to overcome, their switching places when they use their powers (except, of course, tje times that they don’t for no given reason), is easily overcome in a three-minute montage, in which the trio learns to gel while tossing a ball back and forth and playing jump rope.

Thankfully, The Marvel’s boasts a dynamic and terrifying villain played to perfection by Zawe Ashton… Sorry, I just can’t… Ashton’s Dar-Benn is an underdeveloped goober who looks like a homeless witch and is performed with all of the imposing gravitas and presence of butter.

As she and her space cronk unblinkingly mumble their way through repeated vaguely villainous vitriol of clichéd nothingness, you’ll likely ask yourself on more than one occasion, “Why does she only move her upper lip when she talks?” Thanos, she is not. H3!!, she’s not even MODOK.

With all of this said, The Marvels manages a couple of cute moments and when they aren’t filling in the runtime with endless conversations, there are a couple of well-paced action set-pieces.

Overall, The Marvels is a film of would-be Starlords trying so hard to be Guardians of The Galaxy that someone had to pull a hammy. Its only saving grace is that it’s a mere 90 minutes long, which doesn’t give you much time to care about how little you care about what is going on on screen.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Girl Bosses

• Every woman is a girl boss (at least they aren’t snarky b!t@#es).
  • Kamala Khan isn’t just a cheap knock-off of Green Lantern; she’s also a ninja capable of aerial martial arts that would make the Hardy Boyz (WWE) blush.
  • Monica Rambeau is a walking MacGuffin machine who can know, surmise, or do whatever the situation calls for.
  • Carole Danvers is so powerful that she can ***SPOILERS*** reignite a sun in a matter of seconds, even though, in the previous scene, she said that she had no idea how to do such a thing. ***END SPOILERS***

Panderverse

• They literally put a chick in it and made her lame and gay when they arbitrarily tossed in Valkrie from the Thor franchise for a momentum-arresting cameo.
• In the comics, Dar-Benn is a white guy, so, of course, Disney…
  • Not exactly, they did, however, make it a black woman.
• In the pre-credit-mid-credit scene, they put another chick in and made it lame when they clumsily set up a superhero team-up with Ms. Marvel and another teen gal hero from one more Disney+ series that no one cares about.
• Even DEI thinks that The Marvels should cool it.
  • Not a single white guy was evil or cartoonishly weak in The Marvels… because there weren’t any white guys in it. Even the alien planets were populated with nothing but black and Asian actors and actresses. They’re not even pretending to try anymore.
  • DaCosta is the single biggest weakness of the film. So, one has to ask why a studio that has been hemorrhaging money over the last few years would put an inexperienced virtual unknown with a track record as questionable as it is limited at the head of an almost $300 million film.

Random Environmentalism

• There is a stupid and totally random line condemning fracking.