More than four years after the release of Freaky Friday, Marvel still hasn’t been able to overcome concerns about the Disneyfication of movies that represent Marvel. It’s Marvel’s shortest film at 105 minutes, and it’s cheerfully paced, but the occasionally lighthearted tone is a bit like a cosmic version of Freaky Friday, and doesn’t always allow the movie to soar, let alone soar.
While this Captain Marvel sequel is the culmination of a great deal of groundwork, introducing the characters through Wanda and Ms. Marvel, its main weakness lies not in the three heroes, whose interactions produce the good moments, but in its villain. That’s Darben (Zawe Ashton), a vengeful Kree chieftain who wields the hammer Ronan used and wants revenge on Captain Marvel (Brie Larson).
Unfortunately, the threat feels particularly uninspired, and Darben, while powerful, is less than interesting. In short, it’s a far cry from the good Captain’s head-to-head confrontation with the Exterminator in The Avengers: Terminator.
Captain Marvel’s trajectory is a little different, however, as it relies on the anomaly of time displacement to get the trio of Captain Marvel, Monica Rambeau (Tyruna Paris) and Ms. Marvel (Iman Vilani) in and out of each other’s shoes, an abrupt effect that’s mostly meant to be funny, but which proves to be far too confusing at the outset.
Director Nia DaCosta (who co-wrote the screenplay with Megan McDonald and Eliza Karasik), whose credits include the horror sequel “Candyman,” finds Vilani’s Kamala Khan to be the most appealing character, who has a starry-eyed, unabashedly frenzied reaction to her old hero. This brings a playful sweetness and endless fun to the movie.
Another brilliantly practical character also leans toward the naive side: the Flecken cat Goose, who coughs up something nastier than a hairball from time to time.
The duo of Villani and the cat may enhance the film’s youthful appeal; however, the material seems better suited to the narrative space of a multi-episode streaming series, which would only give Comic-Con an approximation of Comic-Con Light, which wasn’t worthy of theatrical sponsorship in the studio’s prime on-demand days. It just doesn’t seem that golden anymore. (Notably, the first movie exceeded box office expectations).
There were a number of factors that contributed to this, some of which were beyond Marvel’s control. However, the most underestimated factors – except perhaps for streaming-driven content overload – may involve the operatic heights of The Endgame, which later films have struggled to replicate, and the loss of key characters who exited in or around The Endgame.
From this perspective, the most encouraging element of Marvel would have to be the end-credit scene, one of the most interesting in recent memory, hinting at future possibilities.
Beyond that, Marvel falls flat when it needs to take a chance. For while the movie’s space heroes get to fly majestically to the stars, these heroic deeds only intermittently lift off.