If you're Terminally Online like me, you know that no movie character is hated quite like Captain Marvel. She's become something of a lightning rod for certain types of really bad opinions. The problem is that those opinions are kind of right - her movie wasn't good, and her appearances in other Marvel movies also wasn't good. But their hatred has been for all the wrong reasons! Unlike mine, which is for totally right reasons. Well, I am here to tell you that this new movie she's in is Not That Bad, I Guess.
It's still not good, unfortunately. It has a lot of the current Marvel problems, like "characters clearly in front of greenscreens, interacting with not physical objects in a painfully obvious way" or "you need to have watched six TV shows to understand the setup at play here." The latter, in particular, is as bad in this movie as it has ever gotten.
But you know what? It also has some actual fun and whimsy included in it. There are some scenes that are kind of delightful, which elevates it somewhat significantly over something like Ant-Man 3 or Doctor Strange 2, up to merely being an average-ish bad movie. They should have made the whole plane out of the black box, but in this case the black box is the weird musical scene, or suddenly having kittens everywhere for no really good reason.
What this movie really SHOULD have been, which would have fixed that "you've gotta read 50 supplementary comics" problem, is a Ms. Marvel origin story. Yeah, she's got her TV show for that, but it's what's in the movie's heart. And Kamala Khan does the heavy lifting in making the film tolerable by being generally delightful in a believable way. It also alleviates some of the problem of Captain Marvel being a stiff, awkward Superman Lady, because now that's what she's supposed to be, the straight man to play against. Sorry Kamala, you may easily be the favorite of the Kamalas I have to see on my computer screen but you can't save this film from drowning in the MCU's swamp of mediocrity if they hide you mostly in the TV show no one saw.
To be honest the movie might even be a 5/10 if it had a real villain, but alas, it does not. I challenge you to find one single person who knows or cares who "Dar-Benn" is and her characterization in this film did not do anything to help that. Extremely boring and generic, just Ronan the Accuser from Guardians of the Galaxy (complete with his weapons and mannerisms, but lacking even his mildly interesting costume design) except even more boring. You probably just thought "who?" and, yeah, exactly.
Score: 4/10
IMDb: The Marvels
PS: The more I've thought about it, the more I have thought that setting all these modern-era Marvel movies in space or the quantum realm or an alternate reality or whatever is the root cause of a lot of their headaches. Sure, characters show up in them sometimes to tie them into the "real" world, but only very loosely, and as little as possible. It serves to give every single one of them Spinoff vibes. It is an escalation and continuation of the zeitgeist in which everyone really believes it ended when it should have, with Endgame. Re-grounding them on Earth with normal people is the answer! Just hand-wave away how weird it is to not have any other superheroes come help, it's fine. The X-Men is probably the last hope that they will do this.
PPS: Please just give up on fake-out deaths that everyone instantly knows are fake. What's the point? This one got undermined within minutes, as if anyone believed it or cared to begin with.
