Some amusing bits in a 'Marvels' mess

 

 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.

     

Reimagining a 1992 horror movie

     

    Director Nia DaCosta's Candyman has been described as a "spiritual sequel" to its 1992 predecessor. I'd call it more of a "rethink" in which the original movie has been given an updated agenda. 

     While keeping her eye on horror-movie obligations, DaCosta infuses the proceedings with visual style and thematic ambition replacing the 1992's white academic with a black Chicago artist.

    Yahya Abdul-Mateen II portrays Anthony McCoy, an artist who lives with his curator girlfriend (Teyonah Parris) in an upscale condo built on the site of the mostly demolished Cabrini-Green Homes, a housing project where much of the original was set.

      McCoy becomes increasingly obsessed with the story of Candyman, a tale most of the other characters regard as an urban legend -- until they no longer can.

       The legend springs from a 19th-century tale about Daniel Robitaille (Tony Toddy) an aspiring black artist who was tortured, given a hook for a hand, and burned by racist thugs sent by the father of a white girl who had fallen in love with Robitaille. Robitaille became Candyman, the killer who haunted the Cabrini Green projects.

       The horror element stems from an additional conceit. Anyone who looks into a mirror and says the name Candyman five times will summon Candyman who'll proceed to rip them apart with his hook.

        Gory, sure. But DaCosta -- working from a screenplay by Win Rosenfeld and Jordan Peel, the director of Get Out and Us, two equally ambitious horror movies -- tempers the bloodshed by suggesting a variety of broader themes. Among them: the hypocrisies of gentrification, the pretensions of the art world, and the history of racial violence and the rage it can breed.

        Abdul-Mateen's increasingly powerful performance anchors a movie that features Colman Domingo as the man who first alerts McCoy to the Candyman legend. 

         I wouldn't say that everything about Candyman works but DaCosta's visual approach (keeping the camera at a distance while showing one of the murders through an apartment window, for example) reflects a strong level of imagination.

       The use of shadow puppets to fill in the movie's backstory proves even more novel. These displays of puppetry -- scenes of racial violence and injustice -- remind us about what underlies the events we're watching.

        You can see DaCosta's inventiveness right from the start. She brilliantly opens the film by turning the world upside down, subverting cliche by shooting the streets of Chicago by pointing her camera at the sky rather than the relying on typical images in which we look down at the city from above. 

      Her choice disturbs and provokes and sets the stage for a movie that deserves credit for having more than exploitative thrills on its mind.