Movie Review: "Captain Marvel"

Captain Marvel is a vaguely-serviceable, superhero-related entertainment product.

Oh, you want more? *sigh* Okay, maybe I'll just splice my Ant Man, Thor 2 and Iron Man 2 reviews together, throw in a few pithy observations about Black Panther, switch out a few names and references and then, voila, instant mediocre Marvel movie review.

Captain Marvel stars Brie Larson as Vers, an alien special operative blessed with special abilities and plagued by buried memories. After she's captured by their arch-enemies, the shape-shifting Skrulls,  she manages to flee to 90's-era Earth. Once there, she partners up with neophyte S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) and Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) to uncover a Skrull plot to steal light-speed technology from a brilliant scientist named Dr. Wendy Lawson (Annette Benning).

During their investigations, our hero begins to learn about her past life as a human fighter pilot named Carol Danvers. As the loyalties of her squad and the Skrull's motivations are revealed, Carol's powers begin to fully manifest. This leads to your standard superhero movie conclusion where an over-powered, scarcely-relatable, god-like entity effortlessly wrecks everything in a boring orgy of murky CGI.

Most of the film's issues lie in the screenplay by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck and Geneva Robertson-Dworet. First off, the early flashback scenes completely "bury the lead", to the point where the audience is waaaaay ahead of the game and we're just waiting for the characters to catch up to us. It nukes any potential mystery and makes the plot feel like a paint-by-numbers set. To make matters worse, the Skrull's intriguing ability to shape-shift should have been the perfect catalyst for endless  intrigue, tension and mystery, but here it's frittered away in lieu of your typical super hero movie story beats.

It also doesn't help that, as a prequel, Captain Marvel feels like it was written with scarcely any consideration for established continuity. For example, how did the all-powerful Tesseract, last seen in the possession of Howard Stark at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger, inexplicably make its way to Dr. Wendy Lawson? Even more disappointing: Nick Fury's salty retort of "The last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye!" in Winter Soldier now sounds patently ridiculous, given this film's goofy revelations.

About the only praise I can give to the film's writers is that they throw us a bit of a curve ball half-way through, which roused me from my slumber. Unfortunately, due to the presence of certain already-established characters right from the get-go, it doesn't take a detective to figure out who the good guys and the bad guys are.

Given that Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok really upped the ante in terms of the visual style of the Marvel Universe, this one looks strictly Phase One flick in comparison. Notwithstanding the Guardians of the Galaxy-lite art design, Captain Marvel looks dull, muddled and flat. Beyond Carol's manacled escape sequence and the train pursuit, most of the action sequences are unmemorable and pretty pedestrian.

Then there's the film's finale, which features all of the frustrating visual murk of the "The Long Night" episode of Game of Thrones, but without all the stakes, drama, character investment or fight choreography. And then, to put the cap on it altogether, the film ends with a yawn-inducing CGI shit-fit that has all the gravitas of a video game cut scene.

Unfortunately, the movie's biggest detriment is the titular character, and I'm still trying to reconcile  the root cause of this problem. After all, Brie Larson's acting chops are solid; one only needs to watch Room for ample evidence of this. Writer / director duo Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are also wonderful, being responsible for the excellent drama Half Nelson back in 2006. So, in light of this, I can only conclude that the fault lies in the creative team's unsuitability to the C-grade subject matter.

Captain Marvel / Carol Danvers / Vers is so broadly written that she doesn't come across as a real character. And, regrettably, this bleeds through to Brie Larson's performance. Sometimes she's as robotic as Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2. Sometimes she's edgy, curt and smart-assed like Gamora in Guardians of the Galaxy. And occasionally, when she's bouncing off Samuel L. Jackson and forgotten pal Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), she actually exhibits a modicum of charm and humanity. Pity, then, that these scenes are so few and far between.

Mindless proponents of the film will claim that Carol acts borderline-schizophrenic because she's a fish out of water with memory issues. Fine, but Gat Gadot in Wonder Woman and Chris Hemsworth in Thor were in similar situations, but those two were veritable founts of charisma. If she ends up being the deus ex machina character who comes out of the woodwork just to wreck Thanos in Endgame, I'm gonna be super-pissed.

So, other than some fun scenes between Brie Larson and the always-great Samuel L. Jackson, a few nostalgic 90's references, a CGI cat animated with the same quality level as Garfield, and a nuanced performance by Ben Mendelsohn as the Skrull leader Talos, there isn't much to recommend in Captain Marvel. Honestly, the movie feels a lot more like one of the blander Phase One flicks and, at this stage in the game, there's absolutely no excuse for this level of laziness.

Tilt: down.