If you pay attention to film news at all, you no doubt know by now that The Marvels, the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is arriving in theaters with the word “failure” practically stamped on the digital equivalent of every frame. Between breathless reports of reshoots and delays, an undeniable exhaustion towards the superhero genre in general and perhaps just a slight dash of straight-up fanboy misogyny (this is, after all, a Marvel movie in which women are the main players on both sides of the camera), it seems as if almost everyone has written it off as a massive flop and most of them are laying the blame squarely at the feet of director Nia DaCosta, the first Black woman to helm an entry in the MCU. (This is ironic because when her previous movie, the Candyman remake came out, most people attributed it to co-writer/producer Jordan Peele and left her out of the discussion entirely.) Things have gotten so dire that, in a desperate effort to get the fans to turn out, the latest trailer includes plenty of flashback clips of many of the most popular MCU characters, none of whom actually appear in the film itself. And yet, for all of its flaws—and there are a lot of them—the resulting film does have a certain weirdo charm, especially in the scenes that don’t involve the usual array of superheroics, and is ultimately more interesting than most of the recent Marvel titles.
While spending her time in self-imposed exile in the darkness of space, Carol Danvers a.k.a. Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) is sent by Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to investigate a strange anomaly on a nearby planet. While doing so, she gets zapped in a way that causes her light-based powers to become mixed up with those belonging to Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), the now-grown daughter of her late best friend who has also turned up on the planet and those belonging to Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a teenager back on Earth who is both a Captain Marvel fan girl and a superhero in her own right, saving Jersey City with the help of a magical armband under the name of Ms. Marvel. Any time one of them utilizes their powers, they wind up switching places with one of the other two—one moment, Kamala is in her bedroom doing homework and the next she is floating in space.
Once the initial confusion settles down, the three realize that they pretty much have to work together as a team—a dream come true for Kamala, but not so much for the other two, who have a somewhat estranged relationship—because a new Big Bad has emerged who threatens the safety of the universe and beyond. This is Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), a warrior who is creating dangerously unstable wormholes as part of a plan to save her own dying planet by stealing the precious resources of other worlds. Utilizing their shared powers, Carol, Monica and Kamala jet off to stop Dar-Benn from destroying everything, a mission that is made slightly more complicated by the fact that it was Carol herself who unwittingly caused the devastation on Dar-Benn’s home planet in the first place.
In many ways, The Marvels is undeniably a mess. The storyline somehow manages to pull off the trick of coming across as both ridiculously complicated (requiring a working knowledge not only of the previous Captain Marvel movie but the WandaVision and Ms. Marvel television series as well to understand who all the central characters are) and absurdly simplistic. The villain this time around is pretty much a dud—somehow both all-powerful and boring at the same time—and the potentially interesting justification for her actions and her targeting of Captain Marvel are badly fumbled. The big action beats—which have the additional complication of the three leads switching around every time they use their power—are indifferently staged throughout, as if DaCosta never figured out a way of presenting them in a distinct manner and instead decided to do them in the most generic fashion imaginable.
Beyond these flaws, it becomes painfully obvious as the film goes on that something went seriously wrong with The Marvels at some point, leading to a lot of second-guessing that failed to improve matters much. There are points where it seems as if whole scenes were filmed and then dropped from the proceedings, leading to any number of jarring transitions—at some points, some characters will be upset with each other and in the very next scene, they will behave as if nothing had happened. As a result, there is no sense of tension or building excitement at any point and when the big earth-shattering moments do occur, they hardly seem to register—even the big finale in which Earth itself is threatened with annihilation comes across as pretty ho-hum.
And yet, while The Marvels is a deeply flawed contraption that never quite coheres in regards to the big picture, especially if you are hoping for a standard-issue superhero saga, it has a certain quirky charm that is undeniably engaging and which gives it a distinctiveness that is often lacking in films of this type. Although her presence in these films has been a bone of contention among some fans, Brie Larson once again cuts a striking presence as Carol, finding just the right notes for both the scenes of broad heroics and the quieter, more character-driven scenes. Although it seems like a bit of a rip-off that this isn’t an official Captain Marvel 2 (seeing as how the original did gross around a billion dollars or so), teaming her with Parris and Vellani proves to be an inspired move as the three play wonderfully off of each other throughout. (Vellani is so engaging as Kamala Khan that I may finally get around to checking out the Ms. Marvel series after all.) The film also demonstrates an offbeat sense of humor and a willingness to get weird that is refreshing to see, especially during a sequence in which the trio visit a planet that has a few quirks that I will leave you to discover, except to note that it leads to a line of dialogue that is perhaps the biggest laugh that I have experienced in all of these films. More importantly, at a trim 105 minutes, it does away with a lot of the bloat that has weighed down too many movies of this kind.
In the end, The Marvels is a mess but at least it is a mess with a personality and while it may not be entirely successful at what it is trying to do—or what it was trying to do before others got a hold of it—I would take over pretty much everything that the MCU conveyor belt has churned out over the last couple of years, especially such dire recent examples as this year’s clumsy Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and the leaden Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. Of course, if you liked those movies, then you may find this to be the grand disaster that the pre-release anti-hype has made it out to be. However, if you are in the mood for a superhero film that strives to do something with a little more wit and style and a lot less self-importance, The Marvels, as uneven and imperfect as it may be in its current form (I strongly suspect that there are the makings of a much wilder and more cohesive film sitting in an editing bay somewhere), you might find yourself getting an unexpected kick out of it.