The Marvels

The Marvel Cinematic Universe is in its first real crisis, and to be honest, it was always lurking out there on the horizon. The fact that it happened much faster than expected due to Marvel's, and perhaps especially Disney's, supercharging of content production via series on Disney+ is somewhat irrelevant. You can't pump coherent, narratively connected superhero stories into the cinema over and over again without mental fatigue eventually setting in.

Declining cinema sales, mediocre reviews from a once far more enthusiastic audience and an increasingly apathetic global fanbase - what to do about it? Well, that's the question, a question Marvel is seemingly addressing by exploring different solutions, alternative setups and even rearranging the masterplan.

But it's not evident in The Marvels, a film that hits at a bit of a bad time, as it has itself been dogged by expensive reshoots, an all-consuming budget of nearly $250 million (some say) and a director who reportedly switched projects with months left in post-production. It's all a bit unfortunate.

So does this affect The Marvels, which is technically a sort of Captain Marvel 2, but also serves as a team-up film for Ms. Marvel, Monica Rambeau (of WandaVision) and Brie Larson's superheroine?

Yes, is the short answer. The Marvels is perhaps the MCU's most tonally confused and disjointed film to date, working neither as a continuation of the three superheroines' respective stories, as an MCU chapter (besides perhaps the most landmark post-credits scene ever) or as a standalone cosmic action pseudo-comedy.

Danvers is brought out of her lonely position as a space cop by finding herself in the curious position of physically switching places with Monica Rambeau (of WandaVision fame) and Kamala Khan aka Miss Marvel every time she uses her light-based powers. This is because the Kree are at it again, this time led by Supremor Dar-Benn, who unlocks a species of wormholes that destabilises the entire galaxy. This is how The Marvels is formed, and over its relatively short running time of one hour and 45 minutes, there's room for plenty of forced jokes, uneven action and odd sequences that feel contrived rather than organic.

The Marvels is a busy film. It's not that it's definitely bad for a major motion picture to be under two hours, but it needs to be designed for that, rather than cut or cut to pieces. Relationships fail to develop organically, the film is a little too light on immersive action that seems like awkward breaks between the remaining set pieces and the film never really manages to work as a comeback for the Captain Marvel character in particular.

It's a shame, because The Marvels actually has some pretty good ideas here and there. The three main characters switching places makes for a few comedic moments here and there, Kamala Khan's family, who have a surprising amount of screen time, delivers every single time and there are small inventive sequences that, if nothing else, try to push the usual superhero formula in a different direction than usual. But it's simply not enough, and for every effective exchange, there's far too much that is either left unsaid, underdeveloped or inappropriately edgy.

Perhaps more critically, none of the three main characters are given any solid material to work with. Larson is surprisingly understated and downright uninventive at times, and doesn't seem particularly invested in the role, even when the scene is flowing and it's time to deliver an emotional gut punch. She's an excellent actress, but here she's checked out. Even the wonderful Iman Vellani is just as charming as ever in the role of Ms. Marvel, but is gradually reduced to a parody of herself as it becomes increasingly clear that the screenwriters have trapped her in the desperate fangirl role. Rambeau has some of the best moments, but a short running time and limited amount of stage space to unfold, complex motivations and backstory means it all falls rather flat.

The villain Dar-Benn, played by Zawe Ashton, is the worst. She's a sort of watered-down Ronan the Accuser from Guardians of the Galaxy, and while the goal of the hateful siege of the rest of the galaxy is understandable, she's nothing short of a flat-out one-liner.

Combine that with forgettable music, uneven CG animation and a thoroughly confused tone that veers wildly between extremes that don't seem to serve any real wholeness or concrete identity, and you have a strangely anonymous romp that doesn't exactly pull Marvel out of the mire they're currently in. After Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, I was fundamentally convinced that a successful and creatively challenging MCU could exist after Endgame, but The Marvels is yet another sign that the current economic and creative crisis is, as the saying goes, "a beast of their own making".