Maybe it’s coming in with lowered expectations for the movie after reading the recent Variety piece shedding light on creative issues within the Hollywood powerhouse that is Disney-owned Marvel Studios.
Perhaps it’s that it’s the rare big-budget action affair — superhero-centric or otherwise — that doesn’t overstay its welcome, clocking in at well under two hours.
Or, you know, it could just be that “The Marvels” is pretty fun.
Directed and co-written by Nia DaCosta, the 33rd big-screen affair in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a pedal-to-the-medal and often humorous adventure that serves as a sequel to both the 2019 movie “Captain Marvel” and the 2020 MCU Disney+ series “Ms. Marvel.”
It brings together the namesake heroines from those projects, Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan, respectively, along with Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau, who form a powerful, if also initially awkward, trio. (While Monica is introduced as a child in “Captain Marvel,” she is portrayed as an adult by Parris and gains her power in the first MCU-Disney+ series, 2021’s “WandaVision.” So you can consider “The Marvels” a follow-up to that, as well.)
“The Marvels” begins by reintroducing us to each of the three in their respective spaces — Kamala in her bedroom in her family’s Jersey City home and Carol and Monica in, well, space. The latter two aren’t together, however; Carol was so close with Monica’s late mother that she is considered Monica’s aunt, but theirs has become an estranged relationship, as Carol has spent most of the last several years away from Earth and out of Monica’s life.
Soon, though, the powers of the three become quantumly entangled and they begin to switch places when they try to use those powers, the movie returning us to a scene we saw at the end of the DaCosta-directed “Ms. Marvel” finale.
The first act of “The Marvels” is a frenetic fest, with DaCosta whipping the characters from here to there and folding in the ongoing conflict between two alien races familiar to the MCU faithful, the Kree and the Skrull. The Kree Supremor, Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton of “Velvet Buzzsaw), obtains a powerful object — which happens to be identical to Kamala’s bangle, the mystical family heirloom she wears on her wrist — and has designs on robbing planets, including the one inhabited by the Skrull, of their natural resources and transfer them to the dying Kree homeworld.
After a lot of excitement, we — and the characters — finally catch our collective breath as Carol, Kamala and Monica come together in one space.
While Monica isn’t so happy to see Carol, that couldn’t be further from the truth with Kamala, a Captain Marvel superfan with the comic book doodles to prove it. Hardly surprising given her work in “Ms. Marvel,” Vellani is a joy as the constantly star-struck Kamala — the character’s first encounter with Samuel L. Jackson’s gruff good guy, Nick Fury, is a blast — who’s understandably delighted to be working alongside her idol. She’s also thrilled to find out Fury and Monica have a file on her on a futuristic tablet.
“Can you believe it?” she says excitedly to her family. “They have intel on me!”
An unfortunate byproduct of “The Marvels” being so short — we get only about 90 minutes of actual movie — is there isn’t time for Kamala to have much in the way of an arc. Her protective parents (Zenobia Shroff and Mohan Kapur) and brother (Saagar Shaikh) are brought along for the adventure to come, but it doesn’t all add up to anything emotionally impactful.
Fortunately, the screenplay — by Megan McDonnell, Elissa Karasik and DaCosta — does a bit better when it comes to Monica and Carol, the latter eventually revealing why she has chosen a largely solitary existence in space. (That she has come to be known by the Kree as “The Annihilator” is a hint.)
Once the three women are working together, making the most of their quantum entanglement, “The Marvels” settles into a solid groove. Before they get into the thick of the fight with Dar-Benn — a disappointingly lightweight baddie as MCU villains go — we are treated to a reasonably entertaining sequence in which the trio visits a planet where the unusual citizens have come to know Carol quite well.
With its fast pace and science-fiction-heavy narrative, “The Marvels” will be a hold-on-to-the-bar ride for viewers not all that interested in ideas such as space travel via jump points and a potentially catastrophic rip in space-time.
And for those who haven’t seen the aforementioned Disney+ series, the movie does what it can to catch you up but be prepared to feel a little out of the loop.
Overall, “The Marvels” is solid work from DaCosta (“Candyman”), who finds a tonal balance that allows for some lighthearted fun even as the stakes of the story are fairly high.
This may indeed be a challenging time for Marvel Studios, but with “The Marvels” it seems to be going full-steam ahead, sticking to the MCU tradition of teasing some of what’s to come in its final moments — including in the middle of the credits.
THE MARVELS
Rated: PG-13
Running time: 105 minutes.
Stars (of four): 2 1/2
Where: In theaters
