Last week, Variety published an article about all of the recent problems at Marvel Studios. Ant Man: Quantumania was a box office failure even though it made $467 million worldwide. Jonathan Majors, who played Kang in that Ant Man movie and also in the Disney+ show, Loki, allegedly beat up his girlfriend and will probably be fired eventually by Marvel. The problem is that his character, Kang, was supposed to be the big villain in the next two Avengers movies. So do they just re-cast him? Or do they re-write the movies with a new villain? Marvel couldn't write him out of the current 2nd season of Loki because they weren't allowed to do re-shoots this summer because of the actors and writers strike. The other problem is that The Marvels, the latest movie, had terrible audience screenings and had to do re-shoots, apparently without the director, Nia DaCosta, because she already left to make something else.
With this article, and the tepid excitement surrounding The Marvels, everyone online has been touting Marvel to be dead or dying, that they're not cool or popular anymore, that everything dies, that it's all over, this is the end.
Is it...really? It probably doesn't help that The Marvels isn't particularly a good movie or anything. Have any of the Marvel movies been any good, though? They've all been fairly entertaining, just big budget popcorn flicks to spend a Friday night watching and then forgetting about. They've never even hinted at being great cinema, nor did they really ever try to be. It also doesn't help that we're getting all this noise over a movie with the superheroes that nobody knows, Ms. Marvel and Captain Marvel. If we were getting a Spider-Man movie or an Avengers movie with, say, Robert Downey, Jr. and other prominent Hollywood actors, maybe nobody would be complaining...and those would probably be big hits and counter any sort of negative publicity. So I don't think it's too surprising if a movie featuring Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel is shockingly not going to be a blockbuster nor a 4 star, Oscar contender.
The Marvels is sort of a sequel to Captain Marvel, a movie that I barely remember. Brie Larson, who won an Oscar but will still never be better than she was in The United States of Tara, is Captain Marvel. That first film featured her origin. It also featured a special f/x, de-aged Samuel L. Jackson. It also featured the Skrulls, a shape shifting alien menace. Considering I don't remember the plot of that film, it probably wasn't very interesting. And considering I've been reading comic books since the late 80's and have never read a Captain Marvel book nor even vaguely remember seeing her before in print, I don't think she's exactly a well known or liked character, is she? I think Captain Marvel also used to be a man. And he also used to be Shazam, but I think DC couldn't use the 'Marvel' name going forward for obvious reasons.
So Captain Marvel is back and so is Samuel L. Jackson. Joining them is Ms. Marvel, fresh from her Disney+ show that came out last year. The one positive thing in The Marvels is Iman Vellani, who plays Ms. Marvel. She's just a hell of a lot of fun to watch. And her parents and brother, which are almost just as amusing, really are the standouts in this murky, stitched-together, slap dash mess of a film.
The plot, as usual in these Marvel movies, is basically just an evil Big Bad trying to gain power and rule but is, of course, thwarted by the good guys. I suppose there's a way to make this been-there-done-that plot interesting, but it's definitely not done here. The villain is a Skree, which are the alien race that have been battling the Skrulls for generations. Dar-Benn, the villain, is played by Zawe Ashton, and she's about as forgettable as a passing road sign. Her plot line involves her getting her hands on an ancient, mystical wrist bangle, which holds ultimate power. Ms. Marvel also has a wrist bangle. I mean...this is the best these 3 screenwriters could come up with? They've also added a third Marvel woman, who doesn't have a super hero name yet, played by Teyonah Paris. She has powers, though, and for no good reason, the movie starts with the three of the Marvel women trading places with each other inadvertently when they use their powers. This does produce a fairly inventive action set piece early on when the three of them are being zapped from a house in Jersey City to a galactic space ship in some far off galaxy to a space station orbiting Earth, all while fighting bad guys.
While the action isn't particularly awesome or anything, the one good thing the movie has is the chemistry between the 3 leads. They attempt to make this somewhat of a buddy comedy in spots, and it works so much better than any of the big, superhero action and Big Bad villain destruction that I would probably rather watch these 3 be in some sort of Bridesmaids type of romp. The movie is also, for whatever reason, kind of bonkers. I suppose the writers and director realized that superhero movies and Marvel movies have not only done it all before and gotten stale, but they kind of need to be shaken up a bit. In this sense, they've added some extremely far-out scenes like a world where the language is song, so everyone sings and dances to greet them. And there's also the cats that eat people.
When the 3 Marvels arrive on the singing planet, the citizens, all dressed in colorful, playful garb, start dancing and singing...Iman Vellani joins in and starts moving to the beat, a big smile plastered across her face, seemingly having the time of her life, seemingly enjoying being in a big budget movie for the first time in her life. It's too bad the audience watching this isn't feeling as good as her. It's almost like she's pushing to make this a better movie, willing it to be something it isn't.
And it isn't...because the point, which we realize at the end, is simply to come up with a reason to get The X-Men, whose movie rights are owned by Fox, not Disney, into the Marvel movie realm. This isn't a movie, really, it's a gimmick to create a reason for The X-Men to show up. A time/space reality rip shows up thanks to the Big Bad, and so we get another universe...which is...Fox's movie studio? And that's after Hawkeye, played by Hailee Steinfeld, shows up.
I guess the idea is to get the audience excited about these cameos leading to future movies and TV shows. How exciting is Kelsey Grammar voicing a special f/x Beast, though?
In The New York Times Book Review last week, there was a review of a new book about Marvel Studios. The reviewer mentioned something about how when these Marvel movies started, with the first Iron Man, the kids that were teenagers and went to see it and were excited about Marvel movies back then are all grown up now with kids...it's been that long. And really, the reviewer was right. Kids don't want to watch what their parents watched and what their parents thought was cool. Things change. Everything ends. While these movies might still be entertaining, light, forgettable fluff, the sheen is definitely off, the coolness is definitely gone, and any sort of excitement about the future of the Marvel Studios brand is definitely diminishing until one day maybe it'll be gone, forgotten, a ghost. **
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