With Avengers: Endgame squarely in the rearview mirror and an expansive, ever-growing world of heroes to choose from, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is slowly but surely inching toward its next Avengers-esque hero roster. The box office juggernaut’s latest entry, The Marvels, seeks to combine familiar franchise faces with more recently introduced TV characters—a mixture resulting in the unlikely (but not unwelcome) core trio at the film’s center. But while the titular Marvels make for an endearing, women-centric found family, the film’s hyperawareness of its role in a larger universe is its downfall; it rushes through emotional beats in favor of flashy action set pieces and world-building for future installments.
Starring Brie Larson, Iman Vellani, and Teyonah Parris, The Marvels (which technically functions as a sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel) follows Carol Danvers (Larson) as she leads a solitary life in space, defending the universe from interplanetary threats. When a mysterious force brings them together, Carol begrudgingly joins forces with her estranged niece Monica (Parris) and blossoming teen hero Kamala (Vellani) to put a stop to a dangerous figure from Carol’s past.
The Marvels’s premise is a clever one that makes for plenty of creative, fast-paced fight scenes: all three superheroes draw their powers from the same source and inadvertently swap places with each other whenever they’re used. The first interchanging fight, especially, makes for one of the MCU’s more memorable combats—one that’s subsequently followed up by a number of ambitious, orthodox skirmishes, including a musical number and an escape sequence set to “Memory” from Cats.
Unfortunately, though, the story that surrounds these fights is far less cohesive. While director Nia DaCosta strikes the perfect balance with the trio in combat, all the characters’ arcs feel frustratingly underdeveloped. With a runtime of an hour and 45 minutes, The Marvels introduces plenty of heavy emotional moments (especially with Carol and Monica’s complicated history) but never devotes the proper screen time to exploring their ramifications.
Performances from Parris and Vellani go a long way to help find ethos in such a harried script, but the plot is so disjointed and fast-paced that the beats never truly land, a fatal flaw that undercuts the attempted thematic core of the film. While The Marvels may deliver more originality than most MCU flicks, an unwillingness to put character over world-building renders it frustratingly ineffective. PG-13, 105 min.
