The Marvels

Directed by Nia DaCosta, The Marvels follows three superheroes (Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers, Teyonah Parris’ Monica Rambeau, and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan) as they team up to save the universe. It’s a typically overblown premise that’s employed to continuously uninvolving (and increasingly interminable) effect by DaCosta, as the filmmaker, armed with a script written alongside Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik, delivers an impossibly incoherent endeavor that strikes all the wrong notes right from the get-go – with the picture’s arms-length atmosphere cemented by an opening stretch that doesn’t make the slightest effort to capture the viewer’s interest and attention (ie the story just starts with little in the way of exposition or context). There is, as such, little doubt that the film’s few positive attributes, including a charming performance by costar Vellani, are slowly-but-surely rendered moot, and although DaCosta admittedly does offer up one fun sequence within the movie’s second half (involving a clowder of alien cats), The Marvels progresses into an almost infuriatingly over-the-top final stretch that ensures it concludes on just about as anticlimactic (and endless) a note as one could possibly envision – with the final result a predictably worthless comic-book adaptation that feels so much longer than its relatively brief running time.

* out of ****