The heroes of The Marvels find themselves jerked from place to place across the cosmos, helpless against forces they don’t initially understand — a sensation not unlike watching the film itself, as it lurches from the goofy to the deadly serious.
And while director and co-writer Nia DaCosta (2021’s Candyman) deserves praise for shaking up business as usual in the MCU, the film ultimately lacks the commitment to fully embrace the smaller scale of human interaction, resulting in an awkward mashup with the typical tropes and beats of a Marvel movie.
Viewers first met two of the film’s protagonists on Disney+: Jersey city teenager Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), who went from superhero fangirl to actual superhero in the miniseries Ms. Marvel, and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), an astronaut and secret agent who, over the course of WandaVision, gained the power to control the electromagnetic spectrum. The entire Khan family — including Kamala’s mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff), father Yusuf (Mohan Kapur), and older brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh) — are delightful creations, but The Marvels never quite figures out how to fit their domestic-comedy shenanigans in a universe-spanning saga in which the fate of humanity is at stake.
The threat to human existence this time is Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), a leader of the alien Kree race with a bone to pick with Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), aka Captain Marvel. Dar-Benn blames Captain Marvel for the destruction of her homeworld, leading her to rob the natural resources of every world that Carol has called home. Dar-Benn’s discovery of a powerful bracelet (which matches the one that gave Kamala her powers) interferes with the light-based powers of all three superheroes, forcing them to trade places whenever they use those powers. (One of the film’s highlights is a fight scene in three different locations — one of them being the Khan household — with Kamala, Monica, and Carol constantly teleporting in and out of each melee.)
DaCosta and co-writers Megan McDonnell (WandaVision) and Elissa Karasik (Larson’s AppleTV+ series Lessons in Chemistry) mine the relationships between the three leads for humor, yes, but also for genuine emotional heft: Monica still resents her “aunt” Carol for abandoning Earth decades ago and never returning; Carol grapples with her guilt over abandoning Monica while also dealing with having teammates after years of going solo; and Kamala learns to work past her starry-eyed worship of Carol while also facing the grimmer aspects of the superhero business.
In a perfect world, superhero movies would accommodate all genres, and The Marvels could have been a dramedy about three women thrown together, learning to work out their differences and to appreciate the many aspects they have in common. But the face-punching, universe-saving demands of the MCU remain inviolable, and the movie must periodically abandon its most interesting threads to feed the beast of audience expectation. When the story takes the leads to a planet where everyone communicates by singing — brushing up against parodying both Disney-princess movies and Bollywood musicals — it’s disappointing that such wild concepts can be visited only briefly before the villain shows up and everyone’s fighting again. (Laura Karpman’s sweeping score offers hints of the extravaganza this sequence could have been had the Marvel powers-that-be had more nerve.)
Still, viewers looking for a superhero movie that’s out of the ordinary will find plenty of oddball delights in The Marvels, from an extended gag involving Carol’s alien cat Goose (the feline weirdness of Captain Marvel gets kicked up several notches) to a montage where the three superheroes figure out how to control their teleportation while double-dutch rope-jumping. It’s an entertaining, if shambolic, 105 minutes, yet one can only imagine how much of a treat this film would have been if given permission to fully transcend business as usual.
Director: Nia DaCosta
Screenwriters: Nia DaCosta and Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik
Cast: Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton, Gary Lewis, Seo-Jun Park, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, Saagar Shaikh, Samuel L. Jackson
Producer: Kevin Feige
Executive producers: Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, Mary Livanos, Jonathan Schwartz, Matthew Jenkins
Director of photography: Sean Bobbitt
Production design: Cara Brower
Costume design: Lindsay Pugh
Editing: Evan Schiff, Catrin Hedström
Music: Laura Karpman
Sound: Tim Nielsen, sound designer
Production companies: Marvel Studios
In English
105 minutes
