THE MARVELS: An Immaculate But Way Clunky Mess of a Marvel Movie

Opening at every multiplex in the multiverse:

THE MARVELS (Dir. Nia DaCosta, 2023)

A decade or so ago, the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe was a lot of fun. What with all the interlocking storylines from film to film, and the charisma and humor of leads like Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, and Scarlett Johansson (all of whom can be seen shining in the Marvel logo banner than begins every movie), many movie-goers and myself enjoyed quite a few of the ongoing adventures of the AVENGERS, and off-shoots like GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. 

 

But now, after over 30 movies, the whole thing has become a big, bloated franchise that I hear more people dis than praise these days. This new release, serving as a sequel to Captain Marvel and an extension of a show I haven’t seen (Ms. Marvel), tries as it might to offer some difference, and diversity, in its leads being three females – respectively Brie Larson as Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers, Teyonah Parris as Proton/Monica Rambeau, and Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel/Kamala Khan – but they seem to be winging, rather than helming, their way through this immaculate mess of a Marvel movie.

 

The premise having to do with ancient glowing bracelets (this film’s MacGuffin/Infinity Stones) sought after fiery villain Dar-Benn, played by a crazy-eyed Zawe Ashton, and a couple of our female leads body-switching when they use their powers at the same time, never built any momentum, with action sequence after action sequence piling up with little impact.

 

While she sure can’t sing as can be seen in a strange musical number with her alien prince played by Park Seo-joon, Larson is a fine actress (she well deserved her Oscar for 2015’s ROOM), but she mainly serves as a straight person to her co-stars and the scenery. She does lighten up dancing to hip hop with Parris and Vellani (whose spunk does charm at odd moments) in one scene, but otherwise her stoic demeanor is frankly dull throughout.

 

THE MARVELS looks mahvelous, as Billy Crystal’s SNL character Fernando would say (outdated reference lost on younger readers), with its incredible cinematography by Sean Bobbit (another Academy Award winner), that presents eye-popping visuals of space stations, alien terrains, and cats with tenacles coming from their mouths that can devour whole human beings, and such sights can surely amuse.

 

But the action surrounding that doesn’t excite, and worse, the comedy that should be the saving grace is awkward, and clunky AF. This latest Marvel offering doesn’t improve on the last entry, ANT MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA (Lord, I hate that title!), and makes me weary of considering what’s to come. There’s no way this Marvel machine is gonna stop, but maybe some flops like these will slow it down so some quality control can be instigated. Here’s hoping because even Samuel L. Jackson, here playing Nick Fury for the umpteenth time (15th, I think), can’t even muster much edge for this beyond played out material. 

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SHAZAM!: A Winning Mix Of BIG & The Greatest American Hero

Opening tonight at a multiplex near you:

SHAZAM! (Dir. David F. Sandberg, 2019)

Despite having watched the ‘70s Saturday morning TV series, Shazam!, when I was a kid, I knew very little about the character. I learned when CAPTAIN MARVEL came out last month that DC and Marvel both had characters by that name. But now, I found out that DC’s version was the first, having debuted in 1940 as a competitor to Superman which led to multiple legal battles.

Marvel obtained the copyright to the name and started putting out comics in 1967 featuring a very different incarnation of Captain Marvel than DC’s. DC licensed the character in the early ‘70s, but they couldn’t use the name as it was trade marked by Marvel so the superhero became Shazam! Got it? I think I finally do.

So here’s SHAZAM!, which is the seventh movie in the DC Extended Universe, and one of the better entries in the franchise. That’s because it’s largely a light-hearted, and often hilarious comic book adaptation with a likable cast and a spirit that more resembles Marvel’s SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING or KICK-ASS than any other of the mostly dark (WONDER WOMAN is an exception) DC film fare.

The film concerns a 14-year old runaway named Billy Batson (Asher Angel) who is searching Philadelphia for his long-lost mother. After getting in trouble with the law for stealing a police car, Billy is taken to a foster home where he meets Freddie Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), a nerdy, wise-cracking paraplegic, who immediately becomes his best friend. 

Through a freak occurrence when riding the subway, Billy is transported to some dark ancient temple (called the Rock of Eternity) where a mystical wizard named Shazam (Djimon Hounsou) asks Billy to put his hands on his staff in order to transfer power to him.

Billy becomes an adult superhero (Zachary Levi, best known as the lead in the 2007-2011 NBC series Chuck) in red tights, a white cape, and a yellow lightning bolt on his chest. Screenwriter Henry Gayden gets a lot of mileage out of the levity of Levi’s talking and acting like a teenager as he learns what powers what powers he has in a farcical sequence set to Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” (because of course it is) in a one of several sequences that make the move come off like BIG meets The Greatest American Hero.

The villain here is the marvelously sinister Mark Strong (also the villain in KICKASS and SHERLOCK HOLMES) as Dr. Thaddeus Sivana, who visited the Rock of Eternity in the film’s ‘70s set epilogue. Sivana, whose baldness can't help but recall Superman's nemesis Lex Luther, wants Shazam’s powers so the second half of the movie involves a power struggle between the two climaxing in an epic, yet overlong, showdown at an amusement park.

There’s a lot of fun to be had with SHAZAM!, but there are a lot of origin story tropes that have become tiresome even with the amusing banter between Levi and Grazer, and what’s with there seemingly always being a convenience store robbery in these movies for our hero to thwart?

But overall I enjoyed Director Sandberg's (the filmmaker behind LIGHTS OUT and ANNABELLE: CREATION funnily enough) SHAZAM! a lot more than CAPTAIN MARVEL, though I doubt it’ll come anywhere near the $1 billion than that movie has made so far. It’s an understatement to say that the output of the DC Extended Universe has been a mixed bag, but with attempts to explore different, more comical tones like this, they might just get their shit together after all.

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CAPTAIN MARVEL: Spectacularly Adequate But The Cat Steals The Show

Now playing everywhere:

CAPTAIN MARVEL

(Dirs. Anna Boden & Ryan K. Fleck, 2018) 

The 21st movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe introduces a new character, Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel. Actually, a new old character as she’s been around for 50 years, so she’s new to the MCU, and new to me. I’ve, of course, heard of Captain Marvel, but didn’t know about her back story, or powers, or, well, anything really.

But I’ve been here before. Whenever they put out a new movie featuring characters I wasn’t previously familiar with, I head to Wikipedia and learn the basics so I at least have an inkling of understanding going in.

In this origin story, we are introduced to the lead character played by Brie Larson as Vers, a member of Starforce (that’s Starforce, not Spaceforce) on the planet, Hala, which is inhabited by the alien race, Kree. We also meet Vers’ mentor, Yon Rogg (Jude Law) who is training her to fight the shape-shifting, green-skinned Skrulls, who have been endlessly warring with the Kree.

Larson’s Vers, who is plagued with visions involving Annette Bening as Supreme Intelligence (that’s her actual character name, well, one of her character names here), gets captured by the Skrulls, and escapes in a pod that crash lands in 1995 Los Angeles (through the roof of Blockbuster Video, mind you). From here on out, the movie’s soundtrack is all ‘90s hits – Nirvana’s “Come as You Are,” Salt-N-Pepa’s “Whatta Man,” Elastica’s “Connection,” Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains,” etc. (Larson even wears a Nine Inch Nails T-shirt at one point).

Soon after, S.H.I.E.L.D. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and Phillip J. Coulson (Clark Gregg), show up on the scene, both digitally de-aged (there’s always gotta be some digital de-aging in these flicks, you know?). Then there is simultaneously a foot chase on the LA Metro, a car chase, and a bunch of furious fist fights. Fury and Vers team up to, you know, save the world from an alien threat, the twist being that the ones we thought were the good guys may not be. Not that that is much of a twist.

Danvers and Fury find one of her old friends, fellow fighter pilot Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), who joins them on the adventure, and Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), who turns out to be not so bad, also comes along for the ride – oh, and to save his fellow Skrulls. Oh, and the McGuffin is once again the Tesseract (it’s been in around half of these Marvel movies), a cosmic, blue-glowing cube that can control matter and energy.

Vers begins to figure out something that most moviegoers will figure out right off that bat – she was an Airforce fighter pilot named Carol Danvers (the “Vers” come from her dogtag getting fractured in a plane crash that gave her her powers (I’m not going to explain anything more than that).

It’s a zippy adventure that fun to watch, even if you can pretty much guess everything right before it happens. The one element I didn’t expect was a cat named Goose who totally steals the show. 

The cat stows away on the military plane that Danvers and Fury commandeered, and even follows them up into space. That’s where we learn that Goose isn’t a cat, he’s a Flerkin, which are alien creatures that resemble ordinary earth cats except when they shoot masses of tentacles out of their mouths, or swallow whole objects or people.

Goose could be seen as an update of Jonesy from ALIEN - think orange cat on a spaceship – but if Jonesy could annihilate hoards of attackers. Now, Jackson is always really funny, but I’m not sure he’s ever been as funny as he is here talking cute and lovey to Goose.

I like Larson quite a bit, and think she won the Oscar for ROOM for good reason. She puts in a solidly stoical performance in the title role here, but sometimes I felt maybe she was taking it all a bit too seriously. No matter, the character still works despite than when I squint she looks like Supergirl. The plot is no great shakes, story beats can be seen way in advance, and some of the MCU tropes seem a little stale, but it’s still a fun superhero movie with enough cleverness to keep most entertained.

The audience I was in for this film were with it big-time because the regular roster of MCU characters that fill in the margins of the studio logo was replaced with a montage of images of Stan Lee’s many cameos throughout the franchise. It got big applause – the first time I’ve seen a logo get that kind of response. Of course, there was also his obligatory cameo later in the film (he had shot a bunch of cameos for upcoming films before he passed last November).

Except for Goose the Flerkin, CAPTAIN MARVEL is, at best, spectacularly adequate. That still means, like most Marvel movies, it’s well worth the price of ticket. Just make sure that, like always, you stay for the end credits stingers. But, of course, you know that; everybody knows that.

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