Movies from Last Year I Finally Saw: The Marvels
Most of last year’s big (or at least big-adjacent) movies “finally” hit streaming towards the end of the year, so I’ve been working my way though them and then writing them up here, back injury allowing. Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
Some movies just don’t deserve the circumstances of their release. But things happen, and movies don’t always get released at the ideal time or place. Such is business! Such is life. Case in point, two things are true about The Marvels:
- This is a fun movie! It’s one of Marvel’s’ better efforts in recent years, it’s full of appealing leads, fun action. It’s pretty good, I liked it, and more importantly, my kids who are right in the center of Marvel’s target age demographic liked it. Solid B!
- This is absolutely the movie where the MCU ground out on a sandbar.
When long-running series in any medium finally grounds out, as they always do, there’s always a point where the audience just doesn’t show up, and something craters. And it’s always slightly unfair to whatever ends up in that crater, since the the quality if that particular thing doesn’t matter—by definition, no one saw it. Instead, it’s the built-up reactions to the last several things. As the joke goes, the current season of The Simpsons might be the best it’s ever been, but who would know? I’m certainly not going to waste my time finding out.
The MCU as a project had been sputtering since Avengers: Endgame gave everyone an offramp and then failed to find a way to get everyone back on board, but this was the point the built-up goodwill ran out. The MCU running out of gas was a big reason for 2023’s strange box office; “superhero fatigue” means a lot of different things based on whose saying it, but a lot of the time what it really means is “I’ve paid full price for enough mid-tier Marvel movies, thanks.”
And it’s really unfair that this innoffensive fun little movie had to be the one that became one of the biggest box office bombs in history, while far-worse misfires like that third Ant-Man or The Eternals, or that awful second Doctor Strange were “successful.” In retrospect, it’s clear whatever Marvel movie came out at the end of ’23 was going to be the bomb, and I, for one, am sorry it was this one.
It’s also a little weird since a lot of the strange blowback the original Captain Marvel got in certain quarters was due to being the one movie between the two halves of the Infinity War / Endgame pair; you ended on a crazy cliffhanger, but first you want us to watch a seemingly-unconnected semi-prequel with an unconvincing de-aged Nick Fury? What? As the the saying goes, if I had a nickle every time a Captain Marvel movie got screwed over by its place in the release order, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
But enough context, how was the movie?
The standout, of course, is Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan. She was outstanding in the criminally under-watched Ms. Marvel, and she’s the best part of this movie. And even better, the Khan family comes along from the show. The best parts of this movie is when it’s “Ms. Marvel: The Movie”, to an extent that they clearly should have had the courage to just do that.
But this is mostly a sequel to Captain Marvel, and that’s a little more mixed. The script seems to want Captain Marvel to be a loner wandering gunslinger-type, haunted by the past and avoiding everyone. The problem is that Brie Larson clearly wants to play the part as a sort of wisecracking Doctor Who with laser hands, bouncing around the universe with her cat getting into and out of scrapes. When the movie gets out of her way and lets her do that—flirting with Tessa Thompson, dropping in on planets where she might have married the prince that one time but don’t worry about it, deadpanning lines like “he’s bilingual,” the character works great. Whenever the action screeches to halt so that Carol Danvers can be sad about things that happened off camera since the last movie, or so she and Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau can be mad at each other for poorly justified reasons, the movie falls apart as the actors visibly struggle to make such undercooked gruel of a script work.
Meanwhile, that leaves Teyonah Parris kind of stuck playing “the third one”. Unlike in WandaVision, Monica Rambeau here doesn’t really congeal as a character. But she’s still fun, gets some good banter in, does the best she can with material.
On the other hand, Samuel L Jackson is having more fun playing Nick Fury than he has since, well, maybe ever. He’s always been a funnier actor than most people use him as, and he absolutely shines here bantering over the radio, or gawking at flerkin eggs.
The central conceit is that the powers of the three main leads become “entangled”, so whenever two of them use their powers at the same time they swap places. This turns out to be a great idea; both to get the three of them working together with a minimum of fuss, but also as a basic teamwork gimmick. The parts of the movie where they’re hanging out, listening to Beastie Boys learning how to use the swaps, or turning every fight into a tag team absolutely sing.
And this is really my core review: when it’s a movie about three charismatic women tag-team fighting space aliens, it’s a really fun adventure movie. It’s funny, it’s exciting, it all basically works. “Found Family” is overdone these days, but it’s hard to begrudge a cliché when it’s done this charmingly. It’s very “watchable.”
That said, it also has the now-standard Marvel FlawsTM: an antagonist who isn’t a villain so much as a hole where a villain should be, a third act that devolves into incoherent CGI punching, and a resolution that’s the sort of “whoops, out of time, better do some poorly-justified vaguely sci-fi bullshit” that usually only happens when the b-plot of that week’s TNG episode ran long.
And there’s a stack of unforced errors too: while the place-swapping is the core concept for most of the movie, it never really pays off. When they finally get to the point where they’re going to have the showdown with the villain, the swapping stops for reasons as poorly-explained as why it started, and instead the antagonist gets what she wanted the whole time and immediately blows herself up. It’s a staggeringly incompetent ending, why on earth wouldn’t you use the thing that’s the main spine of the movie to allow the good guys to win? It’s almost trivial to imagine an ending where the three Marvels use their place swap powers to outwit their opponent, it’s inconceivable that no one working on the movie thought of one.
Which seems like the right time to mention that this is also the movie that inspired Bob Iger’s infamous and tone-deaf comments about having needed more executive supervision. On the one hand, that’s absurd, but watching this, it’s hard not to see what he means. As another example: this movie stars three characters from different sources, one of whom—Captain Marvel—already had her own successful solo movie and then co-starred in the most successful movie ever made, the other two were from different streaming-only shows that, rounding to the nearest significant digit, no-one watched. So, the character that gets the extended “previously on” flashback clip reel is… Captain Marvel? Yeah, movie, I remember Carol Danvers, we’re good there. I could have used a reminder about where Monica Rambeau ended up after WandaVision, though.
There really needed to be someone to look at that and go, “uhhh, are you sure about that?” And the movie is full of weird little lumpy decions like that.
But look, a couple of years ago, none of that would have mattered. We know this is true because Dr. Strange did just fine, and it has all these flaws and then some. But this movie didn't come out then, it came out now.
One of the lynchpins of the whole Marvel Movie project has been that they quickly figured out how to raise the floor and to make 2-3 movies a year that were guaranteed to be a B-, and then if a particular creative team came along and shot the lights out you were in great shape. And when one particular movie didn’t for whatever reason, that was mostly okay. There’s no shame in being mid-tier. Except, it’s now been years of nothing but mid-tier, and that infrastructure B- seems to have decayed to a C. And in a world where taking four people to see a movie costs more than the new Zelda, I think a lot of us need a little more than. “mid-tier.”
How can I put this—I suspect I’m a lot softer on the MCU than most people who own the number of Criterion Collection releases that I do? I tend to view Marvel Movies as the movie equivalent of fast food—but good fast food, In-N-Out burger or the like. And look, as much as we all like to talk about the death of cinema or whatever, being able to buy a double-double on the weekend doesn't actually make that much of a difference to the good restaurants downtown, and I think the MCU has had less of an influence on the world around it than we give it credit for. That said, there is a point where you say “gosh, we’ve gotten In-N-Out too much lately, you wanna go somewhere good?”