By Jon Corrado

★½ (out of 4)

The 33rd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Marvels is both a sequel to 2019’s Captain Marvel and a continuation of the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel, and it’s honestly kind of a mess.

Directed by Nia DaCosta (the Candyman remake), this is the weakest film yet in a fading MCU. It’s a would-be blockbuster that plays more like an extended episode of a TV show, mixing cheesy visual effects with a story that feels messy and rushed, relying too heavily on callbacks to previous films and shows.

The film is built around a team up between Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), her now-grown up surrogate niece Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani). Khan is the Jersey City teenager first introduced in the Ms. Marvel series, who gained powers and now fantasizes about becoming “besties” with Captain Marvel.

Their powers have become entangled due to a malfunctioning “jump point” in spacetime, that causes them to swap bodies whenever they use their powers. It’s a sort of ridiculous gambit that isn’t really explained – the film instead leans into some tired body-swap comedy tropes – and mainly serves to bring this trio together so that they can fight Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton). Dar-Benn is a Kree supervillain whose home planet Hala has become barren after the civil war, and she is after Khan’s magic bangle, which is one of two Quantum Bands that have the power to manipulate energy.

Despite its world-saving storyline, and convoluted lore involving business with the warring Kree and Skrull alien tribes, the stakes feel shockingly low. Dar-Benn is a severely underwritten adversary, with DaCosta’s film instead taking on a downright silly quality at times. Tonally, the film is all over the place, and laced with the sort of cringey “so that happened” style of comedy that has become a hallmark of the Marvel brand, but has completely worn out its welcome at this point.

These attempts at being bubbly and playful often feel forced (though we do also get a bizarre homage to the musical Cats that probably took way too long to shoot, but at least has its own gonzo energy to it that is sorely missing from the rest of the film). The film is thankfully pretty short at a scant 105 minutes (it’s the shortest MCU entry yet), but this also makes the story feel like it has been chopped to bits, and turns the finished product into sort of a jumbled mess. This includes a goofy detour to a musical planet where everyone speaks in sing-song, that doesn’t really go anywhere.

The increasing reliance on streaming series to pad out the MCU was always bound to make these movies feel more and more like extended TV episodes, but DaCosta’s film fully crosses that threshold. Vellani brings energy to the role of Khan, but her caricaturization of her as an overexcited fan-girl clashes with Larson’s often stilted line readings, and can’t really sustain itself over the course of a feature film. The stuff with Khan’s Pakistani immigrant family also feels right out of a sitcom, with The Marvels existing as a Ms. Marvel spin-off more than anything else.

The franchise has now fully descended into what it’s detractors claimed it was all along, offering little more than a soulless barrage of references to the countless previous movies and TV shows, dotted with cameo appearances to tease what’s coming next. This is the epitome of a film that merely exists to set up the next instalment, and it’s all tedious and exhausting after a certain point, especially since viewers are expected to have seen dozens of other movies and shows in order to even fully keep up with it.

The end credits stinger is what’s going to get superhero fans the most excited, but one shouldn’t come to a movie just to wait for the credits. By this point, it’s becoming more and more apparent that the series should have gone on hiatus following Avengers: Endgame in 2019, instead of Disney continuing to oversaturate the comic book movie market.

While it’s still possible for Marvel to deliver a very good one-off like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 earlier this year, these have unfortunately become outliers. Because, between the dreary Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and now The Marvels, it feels like the MCU has finally fallen from grace. Let Martin Scorsese have the last laugh.

Brie Larson as Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers in Marvel Studios’ THE MARVELS. Photo courtesy of Marvel Studios. © 2023 MARVEL.

The Marvels opens exclusively in theatres on November 10th.