Fair or not, The Marvels is a case of the wrong movie at the wrong time for the Marvel machine. A combination of the lack of a coherent connected narrative in the Multiverse era, oversaturation of the marketplace via the Disney+ series and their signature on-the-fly, last-minute-tweak approach to writing, editing and constructing VFX finally leading to an extended string of a projects that weren't well-received by fans has the MCU in the bleakest place its been in at least a decade, if not ever. A low stakes team-up movie between characters that aren't among the heaviest hitters in their universe just isn't the kind of thing that was going to restore the shaken confidence and diminishing interest of the viewers that have started to check out on this world .
Now, does this mean The Marvels is some kind of irredeemable disgrace to the cinematic artform? Not at all. The power-swapping device that brings the lead trio (Brie Larson's Carol Danvers, Teyonah Parris' Monica Rambeau, Iman Vellani's Kamala Khan) together for this adventure paves the way for some fun action sequences, the chemistry between the three leads is pretty good and there's a couple of weird, whacky scenes that provide some of the biggest laughs I've gotten out of a Marvel movie in a while. However, these bright spots aren't enough to stop it from falling into the dreaded "Fine but Ultimately Forgettable Superhero Movie Bucket"-in large part due to several of Marvel's biggest long-standing institutional problems looming large over the film.
First of all, its glaringly apparent that Kevin Feige and co. significantly meddled with the final product. The flow of the film-particularly in the second act-is clunky and it feels like a handful of scenes were haphazardly cut out in order to get the runtime down. Director Nia DaCosta has said recently in interviews that she always wanted the movie to be under 2 hours and while that very well could be true, it's hard to believe that someone with her degree of directorial skill would assemble a cut that features the exact type of roughness that is traditionally associated with a project that had the hands of many a studio shot caller all over it.
Then, there's the typical half-baked, boring Marvel villain in Zawe Ashton's Dar-Benn. While her motivations are clear and simple enough (Danvers did severe damage to her planet and she wants to return the favor by using the power of some magical space bangle to destroy her home), her arc is really underwritten and the whole "annihilate Danvers" angle is diametrically opposed to the goofy nature of the rest of the film-which leads to some strange tonal shifts whenever the narrative is focusing on Benn that draw further attention to the presence of all the corporate cooks in the kitchen. Perhaps their recent struggles and the extra time they got to contemplate their future strategy while their bosses refused to pay to their writers and actors will get Feige to do the right thing and either allow the people he hired to make movies to just do their thing or simply not start shooting something until the script is in good enough to do so.
It sucks that Larson, Parris, Vellani and DaCosta-who all did solid work here-will forever be linked to The Marvels creative and commercial failures. They're merely the unlucky bunch that got left paying the bill for a string of fuck-ups, oversights and bad creative practices that had nothing to do with them at a time where audiences have finally started to grow sick of the way of that Marvel does business.
Despite the wishes of some cinephiles on Twitter, the MCU isn't going anywhere. But if they want to have the works of their non-juggernaut characters continue to make money moving forward, they're going to have to step their shit up from a quality control standpoint. Their days of assembling mediocre-to-decent projects on a whim with no financial consequences are officially over and it's going to take some serious retooling to win the skeptics back. Whether they're capable of doing it or not is another question entirely, but the theatrical industry needs as many hits as possible to ensure its survival and for me at least, that alone is enough of a reason to root for their success in doing so.
Grade: B-
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