Messy sequel, that splits the focus between a host of unfamiliar characters and rushes from set-piece to set-piece

Director: Nia DaCosta

Cast: Brie Larsen (Carol Danvers), Teyonah Parris (Monica Rambeau), Iman Vellani (Kamala Khan), Zawe Ashton (Dar-Benn), Gary Lewis (Emperor Dro’ge), Park Seo-joon (Prince Yan), Zenobia Shroff (Muneeba Khan), Mohan Kapur (Yusof Khan), Saagar Shaikh (Aamir Khan), Samuel L. Jackson (Nick Fury)

The Marvels carries some heavy baggage, being the first flat-out, unarguable mega-flop in the whole Marvel Franchise. It’s a follow-up to Captain Marvel, a film that itself drew a lot of fire from the knuckle-dragging depths of the internet for daring to have a woman in the lead role. The Marvels has no-less than three women in lead roles – although that split focus hardly helps it. After an accident in space, Captain Marvel (Brie Larsen), her honorary niece Monica (Teyonah Parris) – who grew up while an ageless Carol was lost in space – and New Jersey wannabe-hero Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) find themselves teleporting into each other places when they use their powers. Not helpful, when they are fighting to stop a radical leader (Zawe Ashton) of Carol’s old enemy the Kree from destroying a series of planets to restore her own.

That split focus is a big part of the problem with The Marvels, a light-and-breezy fast-paced piece of comic book adventure, so slight that a puff of wind could blow it away. Honestly, it’s hard to imagine there were any discussions about Thor, Captain America or Iron Man having to share the spotlight (and title!) in their first sequels with two other heroes. It’s hard not to feel that Captain Marvel is a supporting player in her own movie (the real POV character is Iman Vellani’s very charming Ms Marvel), struggling to find airtime for her own plot arc, character dilemmas and actions to come into shape.

That split focus is surely partly why The Marvels flopped. With the franchise becoming ever more sprawling, it sometimes feels like you need a PhD to follow the ins and outs of who all these characters are and how they relate to each other. The Marvels never quite knows whether it should be introducing or not Carol’s two co-leads, both floated in from Disney+ TV shows. It says a lot that the final trailers for The Marvels became info-dump recaps of these two shows, and the origins of these heroes, desperately trying to assure people they could enjoy the film without seeing the shows. You can, you just might not really know who or what everyone is.

The Marvels feels like a film cut down to the bone to try and salvage entertainment from its carcass. You can’t help but feel a great deal of plot and context has been trimmed off into the bin while every single inch of the fight scenes (and these are shot with a great deal of dynamism by Nia DaCosta) has been left in.  This makes The Marvels feel, almost more than any other film in the franchise, like a relentless rollercoaster to nowhere. Something thrilling or barmy happens every few minutes – from gravity defying fights to worlds exploding, to our heroes visiting a planet where everyone only communicates through song and acts like they are in a Disney Broadway spectacular – but it never quite hangs together. You never quite manage to land on why things are happening or why you should care. And the film hopes that you’ll be so entertained by moments like its lifting of ‘Memory’ from Cats for a key sequence that you won’t particularly mind.

Most unfortunately, the biggest cuts affect Carol and the villain’s plot line. It’s only late on that we discover Carol has effectively caused a catastrophic disaster on the Kree home-world that led to a decades long brutal civil war in the crumbled aftermath. Perhaps because The Marvels is terrified that we might sympathise less with Carol for essentially unilaterally deciding to take revenge on her past tormentors and accidentally triggering a series of catastrophic war crimes, both her guilt for her actions and the justified anger from the Kree (who see her as a sort of Hitlerian figure of mass destruction), it dials down and fudges these facts and tries to keep the material off-screen or buried in busy scenes. This also means Zawe Ashton’s villain is reduced from a woman seeking to re-build her lost homeland to a typical anger-filled baddie with a planet destroying weapon who we unquestioningly can’t sympathise with.

The Marvels tries to find some clumsy room instead for a plot line where Carol feels awkward around her guilt for not seeing Monica in about thirty years. This however get similarly fudged, not least since (good as Teyonah Parris is as a reserved, by-the-book astronaut with superpowers) Monica is a character largely dropped into the film with very little context who it’s easy to forget was even in the first film. Brie Larsen is also, as is the case throughout the film, given barely a second of interesting dialogue or reflective pause to even begin to try and sell these feelings, so determined is the film to fly hell-for-leather towards the next set-piece.

If there is a star, it’s Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan – not least because she gets all the best lines and Vellani’s winning ability to breathe naïve excitement into any single moment (who wouldn’t be thrilled at suddenly flooring bad guys with your heroes?) is incredibly endearing. Since we spend large chunks of this film seeing things entirely from her perspective – and her family get bucketloads of screen time as well – it’s hard not to start to feel the film is about her. Especially since Captain Marvel’s own emotional conflicts, moral failings and attempts to make amends have been so thoroughly de-fanged in editing.

The Marvels isn’t a terrible film. It’s just also not a very memorable one, a well-assembled, well-oiled piece of franchise IP that will entertain you on a Sunday afternoon (which is when I watched it). But it will barely scratch the surface of your memory.