'The Marvels' briefing

1 ½ (out of 4)

            Lower, lesser, slower baby….

Captain Marvel ain’t looking too bad now huh? Personally, after Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania shrank to a new low at the bottom of the MCU monkey barrel, The Marvels just dug its nails in and tore up that damp wood despite the soggy splinters, daftly deflating the once monumental franchise’s legacy by the biggest margin in a 15-year, 33-film history. At least in 2019, for Act One of Carol Danvers’ first affair things played out like a strong modern Star Trek riff — in 2023, note to note this must be how poorly an average Picard episode or any other recent Trek Paramount+ show turns out…. cheap, goofy, confusing, false and forced, nerd fantasies mashed and muddled to mincemeat.

And look, I’m as forgiving and accepting as viewers come — if I’m entertained, there’s half the battle. But Jesus, I could barely spot the outer-marble first-draft movie that must have existed before this aborted, neutered mini-Avengers episode was Edward-Scissorhanded into superhero snowflakes in editing. Just in moments of dialogue, shot to shot, you can feel the internal rhythm lurch where the ends have been snipped. Foolishly I assumed brevity would be The Marvels’ greatest asset — no MCU flick yet has been so short but this is hardly sweet, somehow it could’ve been mercifully whittled down even further, even at the expense of logic. The film’s total length is only 95 minutes sans credits and I still checked my phone twice (rarely am I so severely disengaged), once to see if the first act just ended since it felt like the story had barely started (wow, we’re over halfway?) and later to see if the climax was even more premature than I guessed (another 20 minutes left??). I don’t know how else to paint a picture of the most pointless, lifeless, disjointed and derelict movie in this Cinematic Universe’s history EASILY and one of the most crooked, undercooked, jumbled, bewilderingly blundered “blockbusters” in recent memory.

I can’t help but find it funny that they’ll catch you up on Captain Marvel (which EVERYONE has seen) in a crappy recap flashback, but if you haven’t seen two of their least-watched Disney+ shows then FUCK YOU DUDE, keep up bro. It’s all backwards — maybe casuals watched WandaVision, but who in God’s name actually stuck around long enough for Ms. Marvel or Secret Invasion? The cameos are also nearly nothing, even for people who lap up that thick fan service — how could I for even a second think something was going down by showcasing Beast and bringing the latest X-Men closer to fruition, completely forgetting I already watched Patrick Stewart’s Charles Xavier explode into morsels about a year and a half ago, smack dab in the middle of the second Doctor Strange?

At least this movie didn’t double down on GIRL POWER, unlike the feeble feminism of Captain Marvel (“got a smile for me?”) — Black Panther: Wakanda Forever sported a similarly, ironically laudable resistance to jerking off its own female-forward self-congratulations. As far as the meager positives go, young Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan has spunky zoomer energy, but unfortunately the script knows it — Kamala has all the movie’s personality to herself, even when she’s pretending to recruit the daughters of cooler heroes like Hailee Steinfeld’s baby Hawkeye, hey let me just stop you there! NO ONE CARES! I like Ms. Marvel’s powers — maybe her show manages a few cool exploits of her matter-forming abilities that are nonexistent here. Teyonah Harris as Monica Rambeau doesn’t have a character apart from feeling hung up on abandonment issues regarding Carol/Vers (Larson) after an unkept childhood promise — in action it’s just scene after scene of her expositing sci-fi-semi-speech into oblivion, wielding powers so poorly introduced I can’t tell if they were earned in WandaVision or here, don’t care to check either. Danvers, like last time, isn’t a real character, and poor Brie has moments where it seems she’s about to deliver a joke and Carol or Larson herself just bail: “Fuck you I’m not quipping,” I see flash in her eyes during some truly AWKWARD passages. At least they don’t retroactively change Larson’s character completely à la Thor, but leaving her as the straight woman against another plank in Rambeau and some dorky teen (Vellani inherits the cliché of the geeking teenage side character ceaselessly suggesting undecided super-monikers) doesn’t make for a nice little team-up, not in the slightest. Speaking of, you never trust a late Marvel flick that has to lean on Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury as a supporting crutch — Spider-Man: Far From Home is even worse than Captain Marvel (honestly the best of his more prominent turns for the MCU) and he’s only a measurable player in that first Avengers flick.

The only gentle concession I can make in this film’s favor is the instances of absurdism were welcome even if they were so pitifully finagling, clasping and otherwise clamoring for MEME status, some puncturing pop culture moment to cycle around TikTok just so there’s ANY kind of social notoriety to this otherwise complete failure. As overcompensation for the altogether absence of thrills, this is now the most lame and lousy of the wilder, wackier B-movie selections of the collection (Ant-Mans, Taika’s Thors, Guardians) with dangerously littler charisma or cuddly wholesomeness to offer otherwise. This wasn’t even irreverent it was just bum-fucking dumb and, for one of the relatively “funnier” Marvel movies, quite the eye-rolling travesty. The Marvels is both bland and bizarre, not intrepid by any reach of imagination but rather a shapeless, exceptionally messy movie.

Poor Nia DaCosta — it’s actually nice that her movie managed a Tessa Thompson cameo (gee thanks Valkyrie for saving some alien refugees!) considering she’s the star of DaCosta’s decent little debut drug drama Little Woods. For Nia the only other stepping stone from indie literally-who to the so-called director of MCU flick #33 is Universal’s Candyman reboot from two years ago (in which Rambeau starred), also a frustrating, flavorless film if a slightly more coherent one. Marvel sure likes to pluck the anonymous, auspicious, aspiring filmmaker while they’re still flexible and willing to let Feige essentially take credit EXCEPT FOR when he blames the film’s failure on a lack of supervision of the on-set happenings.

At this late stage in the game (whether talking supers at large or just the MCU, we’re at like the post-post-game show at this point) I can forgive lighter, less pertinent fare. I’m not one to scoff at a one-off but I will not accept bafflement and displeasure, or the feeling like I’m watching some TV special rather than the surest comic book crap Hollywood can excrete. If I weren’t so utterly whiplashed by this movie’s clearly endless reshaping, then maybe I could be more kindly dismissive but I’m sorry, the film explains everything and orients you to nothing, is flighty without ever being fun and even the main genre gimmick (these three ladies of light can swap places with a simultaneous flick of the wrist) only equates to a few brief, decent fights that are so quick they could either be cleverly, logically choreographed or just nonsensical.

This was just Marvel content, barely a movie. The wheels turn on a dime; oh this is happening now: Carol, why don’t you just reignite a sun with your powers? OHH. My consistent expression throughout the movie was mouth slightly ajar and brows tightly furrowed. I thought last year’s threefold disappointment would be tough to beat but 2023 is the brand’s worst year by far, and I genuinely respect Guardians 3, it may be in my top 10 MCU offerings. I won’t say they studio is creatively bankrupt because they like to, at times, graze about in left field, though they are indeed DRAMATICALLY bankrupt. Feige would have to pull off miracle after miracle to make me care about ANYTHING anymore, and only yesterday we were so invested.

How hard can you lean into cat jokes? They literally played music from Cats for an extended, lady-catered comic breath. For now Marvel’s The Marvels supplants Quantumania’s tiny worst-ever reign as officially the biggest bust of the MCU oeuvre. Now that the emperor of movie media is a little more stripped, nothing can ever be counted on anymore (if it ever could after Endgame, now I don’t even think Fantastic Four could revitalize the universe) and, gratefully, general goodwill toward the brand has slipped past expiration.