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| photo courtesy of wired.com |
Marvel Studios kicks
off its 2019 with Captain Marvel, the
origin story for the hero teased in the post-credits of last year’s Infinity War. Set in the 1990s, Captain Marvel finds Carol Danvers (Brie
Larson) in space, as a member of the Kree Starforce tactical squad, with no memory
of her life on Earth. After a mission goes awry, she returns to Earth and allies
with a young Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) to stop the sinister race of Skrull
shapeshifters from acquiring crucial new technology. But if Carol wants to find
the strength to stop the Skrulls, she’ll first have to discover the truth about
her past.
Captain Marvel
is the MCU’s weakest film in at least two years. It features a likeable, charismatic
set of characters, but it gets hamstrung by a wildly uneven story. And unlike
some of Marvel Studios’ other films with poorer storytelling, which provide
other points of interest (trippy magical visuals in Doctor Strange and the retro music schtick in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2), Captain Marvel coasts by with only a few noteworthy moments to
entice the audience.
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| photo courtesy of cbr.com |
Many of those moments center
around young Nick Fury, for which role Jackson is digitally de-aged. His performance
is striking for two reasons: 1) Jackson steals almost every scene he’s in, and
2) the effects used to de-age him are the best we’ve seen yet in a major tentpole
film. Jackson also gets to act with Goose, Captain Marvel’s cat, and together
they land all the movie’s funniest scenes.
Larson, who won the
Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in Room, gives a predictably impressive performance. She can do quite a
bit with very little, and she brings a welcome level of badassery to the action
sequences. It’s her performance that elevates a few sequences in which Captain Marvel really does swell into something
exciting and meaningful. She struggles, however, with the delivery of some of
the jokes, especially in the first act, where the movie’s humor falls flat more
often than not.
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| photo courtesy of ign.com |
Most blockbuster movies
with lagging storylines have a problem with the second act. They waste time or
re-hash material until we can get to the climactic ending. Captain Marvel somehow has the opposite problem: it starts rough,
hits its stride in act two, and then runs into trouble again in the third act. The opening sequences are interesting but
lifeless; they lack motivation or cohesion. By the third act, Captain Marvel has established major
stakes, but it still can’t muster an exciting finale. It pivots around a twist
that the audience sees coming, it relies overmuch on surprisingly poor CGI, and what’s more damning, it never supplies an
enemy or enemies capable of truly threatening Carol.
It’s the Superman
effect—make a hero too powerful, and it becomes harder to sustain tension from
the prospect that she might lose. Here, the movie has Captain Marvel display a
truly impressive array of powers (a “lightshow,” as one character puts it), but
never does the audience get the impression anyone is capable of defeating her—and
it’s even less impressive when the audience recalls seeing Thor do almost the
exact same thing last April. Only one scene in the finale serves as a real,
character-defining struggle for the hero, and even that moment is hindered by the
execution.
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| photo courtesy of geektyrant.com |
Given its lackluster plotting
and anticlimactic ending, Captain Marvel
rests easily on the lower tier of MCU movies: occasionally entertaining and
funny, but not memorable in the long run. In fact, if it weren’t for Carol Danver’s
inclusion in next month’s Avengers:
Endgame, I daresay Captain Marvel
would be downright skippable.
Captain Marvel is
rated PG-13 for sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief suggestive
language.
TRAILER
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