The Marvels Is Cute, Slight and a Reasonable Amount of Fun

I liked it! For the most part!

Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels is a sweet, goofy, exceedingly likable superhero team up movie that, alas, a disconcertingly large percentage of the population, overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, male, despise with a white-hot burning passion. 

People hate The Marvels and root for it to fail because of what it represents. The film’s haters don’t have a problem with superhero movies, or superhero team-up movies. What makes them angry is that The Marvels isn’t just a superhero movie. In their minds, it is a Superhero movie for girls. 

Misogynists the world over did a celebratory dance when The Marvels’ dire first weekend box-office returns were announced because the movie embodies a commitment to diversity and representation that the Right inexplicably sees as tantamount to white genocide. 

Captain Marvel enraged Incels to the point that they insisted that the movie was a massive flop and further illustration of the newfangled maxim “get Woke go broke” even though it grossed over a billion dollars. 

They hated Captain Marvel because it was a groundbreaking superhero blockbuster with a female lead but also because they thought Brie Larson was too uppity and feminist in her public persona in a way they found threatening. 

Nothing confuses and enrages toxic geeks more than women they find sexually desirable expressing opinions and ideas that they find objectionable. Hence their hatred of AOC.

The Eternals is so diverse that Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel now qualifies as one of its least diverse aspects. Larson is a woman but she is a white woman, unlike her pals Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani). 

In what can only be described as an unforgivable insult to all white people since the beginning of time, Monica Rambeau is an African-American while Kamala Khan is Pakistani-American. 

If The Marvels feels unmistakably like a television show either from today or the late 1970s, it’s because two-thirds of its leads come from Disney+ shows. Monica Rambeau is an alum of Wandavision while Ms. Marvel has her own show on the streaming giant. 

Kitties!

The Marvels is consequently a curious proposition creatively as well as economically. 

For a follow-up to one of the most important and successful superhero movies of all time, it’s shockingly slight and inconsequential, an amiable goof of a movie that doesn’t aspire to be anything more. 

Captain Marvel is of course a superhero so remarkable that she inspires hero worship in other, lesser superheroes like Ms. Marvel but The Marvels turns her into a doting den mother to two younger, lesser known heroes. 

Larson’s controversial hero destroys the Supreme Intelligence, the AI ruler of alien race the Kree. This has tragic and wide-ranging consequences for Kree, all of it negative. 

Captain Marvel, Monica Rambeau and Ms. Marvel are surprised and confused when their light-based powers become intermingled and they begin switching places with one another accidentally. 

This inspires the titular trio to team up to fight Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), a fierce Kree warrior who has one powerful Quantum Band and is seeking the other. 

The Marvels is defiantly silly. It’s the kind of movie where the heroes end up on a planet where everyone sings, and, oh yeah, Captain Marvel is also their princess for reasons far too ridiculous to go into. 

The trio bonds during a montage sequence set to the Beastie Boys’ thematically appropriately anthem “Intergalactic.” As with a similar sequence in the ill-fated 2016 Ghostbusters reboot with all the ladies set to DMX’s “Party Up”, I felt like I was being pandered to relentlessly as a nostalgic Gen-Xer. 

And I loved it! It totally worked for me. I am a sucker for bonding sequences set to pop songs. I’m also a sucker for cute animals and cute animals that turn out to be insanely powerful aliens. 

It sure can feel like there’s nothing new in the exhausted, depleted world of superhero movies. If nothing else, The Marvels deserves credit for a standout sequence unlike any I’ve seen in the history of superhero movies. 

In it, the progeny of Goose, a member of an alien race known as Flerken, which look like cute kitty kats but are actually voracious tentacle monsters, are called upon to help conserve space on a ship by consuming all of the terrified people onboard in one giant orgy of extra-terrestrial feline madness. The idea is that once they reach their destination the kitties will vomit up the folks they just consumed, none the worse for wear. 

It’s a gloriously bonkers set-piece I will remember long after the rest of this ingratiatingly slight movie has disappeared from my consciousness. 

Samuel L. Jackson returns as Nick Fury in a movie that thankfully does not feel the need to tie everything to a larger MCU chronology. That is until two goofy end credit sequences randomly bring in star-power from other movies and universes. 

First Ms. Marvel, who steals the film and is also a goddamn delight, tries to recruit Hailee Steinfeld’s archery-adept Kate Bishop for a teenage superhero group. 

Then, in an even sillier development, Kelsey Grammer, who you might remember from X-Men 3, one of the least loved superhero movies of all time, returns as Hank McCoy/Beast in a mid-credit scene set in another dimension. 

I watched The Marvels in 3-D with my son and enjoyed myself, within reason. I liked the low-stakes. I liked the goofiness. More than anything I liked Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel. Also, I liked how things were constantly flying at the screen, which is the whole point of 3-D.

Here’s the thing. Just as the Incels of the world are emotionally invested in movies like The Marvels failing miserably I will admit upfront that I have a vested interest in them succeeding. 

That’s because, like seemingly every sane soul who is not a monster or overtly xenophobic and racist, I think that diversity is wonderful and that more representation for groups like Pakistani-Americans in massive, mainstream popularity can only be a good thing. 

I’m rooting for movies like The Eternals to succeed because I would hate for Hollywood to interpret the film’s lackluster commercial performance as incontrovertible proof that audiences do not want women or POC in superhero movies. 

I also don’t want The Marvels’ disappointing box-office to be interpreted as a sign that Disney made a mistake in hiring a black woman in her mid-thirties to direct a two hundred and fifty million dollars and that going forward movies like this should only be directed by veteran white men with dependable track records like, I dunno, Ron Howard. 

Larson is far and away my least favorite Marvel. There’s nothing wrong with her performance and a lot that’s right but she doesn’t have the fresh-faced charm and ebullient energy of Iman Vellani or Teyonah Parris’ gravitas.   

If The Marvels was a My World of Flops entry it’d be a Secret Success and hopefully over the years this will develop a cult following for what it is—a charming and enjoyable attempt to do something at least a little different—as opposed to what it is not. 

Three and a half stars out of Five