Watching The Marvels, I occasionally felt as if I'd walked into a movie in the middle. Maybe the folks who had been there from the start understood why a battle in a Jersey City home featured characters who had passed through what the movie called "jump points" and were now swapping locations with one another.
OK, I did see it from the beginning and I'm exaggerating, but The Marvels isn't likely to show up in many screenwriting classes that place a premium on coherence.
A sequel to 2019's Captain Marvel, The Marvels mostly explains its mysteries as it plasters the screen with abundant fights (not thrilling), attempts at humor (a gag involving the musical Cats proves amusing), and a story in which Carol Danvers, a.k.a., Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) must atone for inadvertently wrought consequences inflicted on Hala, home planet of the Kree.
Sporting a snarl and hefting a hammer-like weapon, the vengeful Dar Benn (Zawe Ashton) leads the battle against Captain Marvel.
In this outing, Captain Marvel doesn't fly solo. She teams with two young women, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), an energetic Jersey teen who idolizes Captain Marvel.
Rambeau, by the way, is the now-grown daughter of Maria Rambeau, a friend of Captain Marvel in past episodes.
Captain Marvel, Kamala, and Monica Rambeau race through a stream of unimpressive effects and a screenplay that, to me, never seems to find its footing.
Director Nia DaCosta (Candyman) adds feminist and youth spin, but seems less interested in narrative cohesion than cinematic play, much of it silly, notably a scene in which Captain Marvel becomes a princess in a world in which all the characters sing their dialogue, a misplaced but weirdly welcome Bollywood intrusion.
At that point, I wondered what glories DaCosta might have achieved had she approached the entire movie in a spirit of parody. The movie's cute but nasty alien cats, though overplayed, could have helped in that regard.
A merciful one hour and 45 minutes long, The Marvels made me think that the MCU universe has become so splintered generalists need not apply. The Marvels is a fans-only endeavor -- and it remains to be seen whether all of them will be eager to sign on.
