The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
Much is being made about the abysmal box office performance of The Marvels and, really, it’s hard to understand why this isn’t a smash hit. It’s a team-up with characters that few people care about and a sequel to a television series that few people care about with a plot that feels completely inconsequential and requires in-depth knowledge of not only the MCU movies, but also the television shows. Much like Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist: Believer, I blame the patriarchy.
This is the point when I would normally summarize the plot, but, to be honest, I have no fucking idea what’s happening in this movie. I’m speaking as someone that has seen not only every MCU movie, but every movie ever made based on Marvel Comics. Have you ever seen the 1978 made-for-TV Dr. Strange movie? Or the Nick Fury movie starring David Hasselhoff? Well, I fucking have and even that isn’t enough for me to follow The Marvels. I could just look up the plot in Wikipedia and pretend that I know what’s happening, but damn it, that wouldn’t be genuine. So I will take my best shot at it from memory.
At some point, Captain Marvel destroyed an alien planet. I’m not sure why or when. Our villain is a survivor of that planet and I never caught her name, but she has a big hammer so I’m going to call her Space Hammer Lady. Anyway, Space Hammer Lady is trying to rebuild her home planet by stealing elements from other planets or something. To do this, she needs two magical bracelets (because of course she does) and one of those bracelets is in the hands of Ms. Marvel, who I don’t think has been in a movie before but she has a television show that I will never watch. Ms. Marvel, Captain Marvel and the grown-up version of Monica from Captain Marvel have to team up to stop Space Hammer Lady because they have similar powers or something, even though Space Hammer Lady seems to have some legitimate complaints here. Oh, and the three heroes now constantly switch places with each other through teleportation. I’m not really sure why.
Calling this movie a seemingly inconsequential sidestory would be to vastly overestimate the gravitas of the plot. This feels like a television episode stretched out to feature length, though I have to thank Marvel for the mercifully (and uncharacteristically) brief running time. I don’t know who the villain is, I’m only marginally aware of who two of the heroes are and what’s worse, I still don’t care after watching the movie. The characters and writing aren’t strong enough to make this a viable standalone movie and (aside from the post-credit scene), the movie seems like a footnote in the larger Marvel story. There is simply never a reason to care about any of this on either a micro or macro level.
The film does attempt to carve out a quirky identity for itself, like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies or Thor: Ragnarok. However, it fails miserably, like Thor: Love and Thunder. While not as grating as that fourth Thor entry, The Marvels is more forgettable because none of its set pieces make much of an impression. The man-eating kittens or the trip to the musical planet should be more funny than they are, but there is little to the writing other than the concept itself. I’m supposed to laugh because there is an alien cat, not because the alien cat is actually doing something funny. There is a difference and maybe such things are just better left to James Gunn, as director Nia DaCosta is unable to translate potentially funny scenarios into actual humor.
MINOR SPOILERS. As in Captain Marvel, I again don’t understand the extent of Captain Marvel’s powers. In one moment, she will be getting her ass kicked by Space Hammer Lady and the next minute she will literally reignite a fucking sun by flying through it. This is exacerbated by the ending, in which Captain Marvel defeats Space Hammer Lady by blasting her into outer space, which is a stunningly simple solution and begs the question of why she didn’t just do that in the first five minutes of the movie.
Not interestingly, the resolution somehow causes a tear in space that opens a portal to another dimension. I honestly have no idea what’s happening here. But Monica decides to fix the tear using her powers (whatever those powers are), but she does so from the other side of the tear. What happens when you brick up a hole in the wall, but you do so from inside the wall? If you answered that you would get stuck inside the fucking wall, then you have better problem solving skills than our hero. So her dumb ass is stuck in another dimension, where the movie ends with her meeting someone that elicited the only audible response from the small crowd that was in the theater with me. Yay. END SPOILERS.
2023 is forcing me to reevaluate my grading scale because I have handed out too many Fs this year. If I had seen this in January or February, I probably would have given it an F, but that slightly younger version of me wasn’t prepared for the onslaught of crap that this year would throw at me. I wasn’t angry or particularly bored during The Marvels; I just didn’t care. The running time is shockingly reasonable for a comic book movie. The performances are generally phoned-in, but fine. Ms. Marvel is annoying as hell, but I can’t really fault Iman Vellani for her performance because she seems to be delivering on how the character is written. I’ve gotten this far and I literally just remembered that Samuel L. Jackson is in the damn movie. This isn’t as obnoxiously stupid as Thor: Love and Thunder, so….yeah, there is my quote for the movie poster. “Not as obnoxiously stupid as Thor: Love and Thunder!” exclaims The Film Doctor. You’re welcome, Disney.
Image by: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marvels#/media/File:The_Marvels_poster.jpg
