I am going to spoil this for you if you haven't seen it...
Starring: Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton, Samuel L. Jackson, Gary Lewis, Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur, Park Seo-Joon & others
Directed by Nia DaCosta
Runtime: 105 minutes
IMDB Rating (at time of writing) 5.8 - the lowest rated MCU film of them all. A full 0.5 points lower than Eternals (6.3) and an even lower rating than Quantumania (6.1).
Here it is - the film that essentially has probably killed it off the MCU as a viable franchise in the future. A film that has grossed just over $200million, effectively costing Disney money to make it, somewhere in the region of the same again and a bit more. Anyhow, moving on...
I'm genuinely puzzled about this film because there have been worse Marvel films; to be fair, not that many that have been worse, but this is by no means the worst despite its rating. Yes, there's definitely a tonal problem with the film as many critics have pointed out and there's a couple of things I couldn't get my head around, there should never have been the musical number, which in many ways was the turning point in the film because up to that point it was working for me, but other than this it could have been a whole lot worse.
There was a shortage of plot and not enough back story. Dar-Benn should have been fleshed out a bit more; maybe some context as to who she actually was and why she was doing what she did rather than us find out about it almost by accident about halfway through the film. Also Zawe Ashton exudes about as much menace as Joe Lycett in a dress; she's not a good enough actor or has enough gravitas to carry the role of 'world destroyer' - she was a disappointment.
However, despite a patchy beginning, it was rolling along at a cracking pace with some lively interaction and what seemed like a half decent story, even if it made little or no sense and it has to be said that Iman Vellani is quite brilliant as Ms Marvel, at least until the end of the film when there was one of the many problems that crept into the movie. There was excellent chemistry between the three main heroes, well maybe not exactly but it worked better than I expected. I kind of struggled with Teyonah Parris's character but probably because she felt almost shoehorned into the film and even her 'origin' garnered a subtle sense of WTF from Carol Danvers when it was explained to her; in fact getting her light powers from walking through a hex created by a 'mutant' witch is probably the lamest origin for a hero (apart from maybe a deaf, dumb, one-legged vigilante getting her powers from a line of Native American ancestors - but let's not go there).
There were some things I didn't understand, such as why Valkyrie was in it and how she was going to integrate a bunch of Skrulls into the corner of Norway that New Asgard now lives and how come she's buddies with Carol Danvers when a lot of the tension between Danvers and Monica Rambeau was about Carol not reconnecting with Monica after the blip was reversed. This was probably one of the first plot problems. Another thing was how Dar-Benn could be beaten inside three minutes in the final battle, especially given how difficult it had been earlier and where were all of her henchmen? How come Dar-Benn's reason for saving Hala was based around places that Captain Marvel was connected with - how did she even know this? What happened to the second wristband after Kamala and Carol pumped Monica full of energy to close the rift in dimensional space, which wasn't really explained as to how it happened and why didn't they just reverse it if Kamala could use the two wristbands without destroying herself? What significance the penultimate scene was - have the Khans moved into the old Rambeau house or is Carol setting up home there herself and if so why were the Khans even there? What was the point of Goose in the film and why wasn't all of 'her' eggs explained and why were they there in the first place conveniently producing enough flerkins (or whatever they're called) to help evacuate the space station, which we didn't really get any explanation as to why it suddenly was in so much danger. Then there was Kamala using her powers even though she didn't have her wristband; creating a giant hand to catch Carol after she fought Dar-Benn to the finish. This was either a really awful bit of plotting/filmmaking or she doesn't need her bangle so it doesn't matter what happened to the second one she had been wearing prior to her return to earth...
The main problem with the film was it had three (well, two and a half) characters who had great chemistry, some promising ideas but all were surrounded by pointless episodic moments, a villain with zero menace and no sense of impending jeopardy. it had a musical number that completely ruined the tone of the film and speaking again of tone - on one hand you have a woman wielding massive amounts of power, destroying planets and being fucking deadly serious and you have three heroes who spend a lot of time farting about, being girls and generally not seeming to take the threat before them very seriously. This is a film that is a mass of contradictions that I cannot believe Marvel and Disney execs didn't see prior to release. How could they allow this film to be released in the form it was without questioning things that even crap critics like me could see from the other side of the fucking universe? Yet... I still didn't think it was as bad as Eternals and was probably more enjoyable than Quantumania or the other unbelievably bad tonal film Thor: Love & Thunder, which is the only superhero film that had cancer as a major subplot and trivialised it to the point of bad taste.
The problem is this could have been so much better and it felt like someone high up decided to let it be released like this to help facilitate the end of either Kevin Feige or the MCU in general. It does, however, help speed up the end of the superhero film genre for the foreseeable future. Marvel does have Deadpool 3 coming out this year - their only cinematic release - and that, if it replicates the first two, won't really be an MCU film; so what we're seeing is no actual MCU films until the summer of 2025 when (and if) the Captain America film comes out.
Finally, regardless of that last paragraph there is the two finale scenes to deal with. The first 'epilogue' features Kamala recruiting Hailee Steinfeld into her new team - in a kind of nod to Nick Fury recruiting Tony Stark; but it doesn't really work because the new 'Hawkeye' is also another character who simply isn't good enough to carry a feature film... and then there's Monica Rambeau's conclusion as she wakes up in a futuristic hospital room in the presence of her mother, except she's called Binary and if you know your comics you'll know that Binary was who Ms Marvel eventually became and Ms Marvel in Marvel Comics was originally... Carol Danvers. But, of course, that isn't the kicker, it wasn't the real point of the post credit scene, that was Kelsey Grammar's Beast (now fully CGI) who references 'Charles' and we're clearly in a universe where the X-Men (and the Star Jammers) exist. This surely was there for two reasons - one to get the fans really excited and to hopefully get them to forget the mess they'd just watched. The fact the X-Men have been introduced might have been a gambit they thought might sell the film via word of mouth - that clearly hasn't worked; so we're left with a universe that Monica is stuck in that has mutants in it; they're either going to find a way into our/the MCU universe or this is a subplot that has nowhere else to go - exit Monica Rambeau, thanks for your half-hearted contribution. The Marvels - a film that didn't promise much, failed to deliver but somehow with all its faults isn't the worst thing Marvel/Disney has done in the last two years.
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