The Marvels review: Iman Vellani shines in a film that signals Marvel Studios' ennui

Carol Danvers played by Brie Larson in The Marvels. (Screen grab/YouTube/Marvel Entertainment)

“O captain, my captain,” Kamala says at the sight of her role model, Carol Danvers, smashing a bunch of rogue, indistinct alien ships. It’s a scene that pops up as a reminder of the comic-book glee, the adolescent goofiness that irregularly perforates the lustreless, at times boring, surface of this film.

The Marvels is predominantly and promisingly all female, led by three actresses, who turn in decent performances. It’s also a film that fumbles in tone, and awkwardly merges entire worlds and is at its most entertaining when directed by the naivety of a teenager. Which probably says something about the fatigue and staleness that has set into the Marvel assembly line. Its uncalculated risks now count for rare moments of ingenuity. To which effect, The Marvels feels like a seasonal ritual that though it flickers with joy and humour every now and then, largely emblematizes a once prodigious studio’s deepening creative rut.

We are thrust into a three-dimensional story, where Kamala played by Iman Vellani, Carol played by Brie Larson and Monica (the daughter of Carol’s late friend Maria) played by Teyonah Parris unintentionally switch places between their respective realities. They are connected by light, a common ingredient in their individual powers.

While Kamala is living her regular life on earth, Monica is part of Nick Fury’s cohort, conducting arbitrary space surveillance. Carol meanwhile is wandering space with the look of a hippie who no longer enjoys the drugs or the freedom. After Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), an inter-galactic baddie with a grudge uses a bracelet like the one Kamala uses to break a ‘jump point’, realities from different galaxies begin to crash into one another. Dar-Benn’s plan is to steal natural resources from other galaxies to help rejuvenate her own. Carol, touted by the residents of this diminished ecosystem as ‘The Annihilator’, shares a poignant history with this villain. She is enemy number one, a ruse that is absurdly forgotten as soon as it is brought up.

A lot of this sounds like route 1 packaging, and at least in the action sequences and the oddly rushed set-pieces feels unremarkably similar to everything you’d expect from a hastened superhero film. The antagonist, though a woman, is hardly allowed an inner life worth her anger and air of bitterness. Even the personal history that Carol and Monica share, though intriguing as an emotional sub-plot, is glossed over like a conciliatory handshake between two pals who momentarily come to blows in a school playground. Kamala’s star-struck nerviness in front of Danvers is charming but hits the brick wall of superhero stoicism every time it tries to add a bit of zing to the proceedings. To the point that the film has to turn to a cat to rescue ensuing boredom.

Directed by Nia DaCosta, The Marvels is comfortably female in most of its gaze. The fact that it is asked to circle around to superhero gimmicks only robs it of the novelty of holding onto it. Late into the film, a sequence set on a planet where the only language that exists is ‘song’, and where Captain Marvel is revered as a Disney-like princess, embodies the Barbie-sque vision, commensurate with the predominantly female source and makeup of this film. That, however, is the only touch of innovation as the banal action, the superhero frivolity and a weirdly stiff Larson get in the way of Kamala and Monica’s charm offensive. This is maybe a sign of the fact that Marvel’s speculated decline is largely of its own, incredulous making. Even the studio’s brightest ideas are bagged with superhero shtick that dulls everything else with it. Only a purring, erratic cat can somewhat rescue the film from intergalactic lethargy.

The performances in The Marvels are at best adequate. Samuel L. Jackson looks a bit jaded, having to bring that eye patch out of the drawer every few months. Larson’s lack of sentimentality becomes the butt of a late joke, but you get the feeling more could have been done with that lean frame and terse air of an actor who exudes conviction enough to become something other than a superhero synonym. Surprisingly, it’s Vellani and her conservative family who steal the show, kicking a tired narrative from the curb to the highway of contention. A highway increasingly crowded by sluggish superhero traffic. After all, it’s not a great sign when your post-credits scene, elicits a solitary sigh of excitement.

Directed by Nia DaCosta, The Marvels is comfortably female in most of its gaze. (Screen grab)

The Marvels isn’t the worst MCU film, nor is it anywhere close to being the best. It’s middling, lacks finesse, a directorial stamp and an antagonist you’d actually want to rally against. Even its high-grade, computer-generated cataclysms feel so arbitrary, you can hardly bring yourself to care. An entire planet, made up predominantly of water, in fact is outright forgotten after our heroes decide to take a confessional detour. It maybe epitomizes the indifference that sets in when you turn storytelling into a conveyer-belt formulation. Lather, rinse, and painfully but indignantly, repeat.