The Marvels (2023)

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading the nonfiction book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, et al, and rewatching a few of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s greatest hits (Iron Man, The Winter Soldier) – all while keeping current with the second season of Loki and, yes, even the colorized version of Werewolf by Night on Disney+. And if you’ve been reading my reviews long enough, you’ll have sensed my genuine fatigue with all of this – not in keeping track of the superhero genre but in keeping up. I haven’t reviewed the Marvel shows because it’s too much content to watch and digest; to be honest, most of it elicits an “It’s Fine” shrug from me. There’s just so much of it these days, and very little of it is actually great. It’s beginning to feel a lot like homework.
 
And this weariness is Robinson’s whole point. In MCU, she and her co-authors observe that the low points in the 15-year franchise have been when the movies lose sight of what made Iron Man such a roaring success – not its CGI smash-fests or its breakneck sprint to a bigger picture, but the quiet character moments that “let us experience who they are as people and not legends” (352). In short, let superheroes be fun, let them be human, and make the world-building afterthought, not a forethought. (In other words, stop trying to make Kang happen.)
 
With this whirlwind reminder tour fresh in my head, I plunked down for a ticket to the 33rd MCU film, plugged my ears from the noisome and tiresome culture wars, and just prayed to God and Kevin Feige that The Marvels would be fun. Maybe prayers do get answered, because The Marvels is breezy and bright, weightless in a way against which we’ve been inoculated, and I smiled most of the way through.
 
Thanks to some super-quantum cosmic entanglement, Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) finds herself physically switching places with her niece Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and superfan Kamala “Ms. Marvel” Khan (Iman Vellani). The unlikely trio soon learn that their predicament comes at the hands of Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), who is tearing worlds apart in a bid to restore the Kree Empire to its former glory.
 
While in one sense the Marvel Cinematic Universe set an unbeatable bar with Avengers: Endgame, its more recent outings have simultaneously lowered the bar. From the incoherent plotting of Spider-Man: No Way Home to the downright dismal proceedings of Thor: Love & Thunder, right up through four years and ten seasons of television shows, there’s very little of it I want to rewatch – and the very notion of a soup-to-nuts rewatch is so exhausting that I can barely stomach the sentence. In a world of Spider-Verses, who needs more Quantumania? So I went into The Marvels with my expectations fairly lowered, and the hurdle it needed to clear was whether I would begrudge it the time I spent with it.
 
The Marvels is far from perfect. It’s brief and a little thin, and its villain is the very definition of undercooked; Dar-Benn is not unlike her predecessors Ronan or Malekith, and the fact that you are likely rushing to Wikipedia says it all. Marvel has sometimes (often?) struggled to make its one-and-done villains sing, and Dar-Benn is no different. Her motives are clear enough, but the film doesn’t give Ashton much to do beyond scowl and brandish a hammer – a shame, since there is something at the core of this character worth exploring beyond a tepid and compulsory flashback sequence.
 
Brie Larson and Teyonah Parris are fine, too, getting to cut loose a bit more than they had in their respective debuts. The film truly shines, though, on the capable shoulders of Iman Vellani as Ms. Marvel. Where her Disney+ miniseries felt bogged down by cosmic nonsense and lifeless enemies, The Marvels wisely plays into Vellani’s unabashed affection for the genre and the giants with whom she shares the screen. When she squeaks with delight, we get it because we too would feel starstruck in the presence of Samuel L. Jackson (whose Nick Fury is so much more entertaining here than in the limp Secret Invasion). And in the film’s final scene, Vellani gets to riff on an iconic MCU moment, so effortlessly cool and nerdy that I literally applauded for how perfect it was for this character, this performer, to reenact that moment.
 
Indeed, the film is aptly titled The Marvels because it is that rare three-hander that gives the team a perfect balance of screen-time and responsibility for the plot. (The fact that it is handily stolen by Vellani is a testament to her dynamism as an actress.) An early action sequence introduces the dizzying effect of the three women swapping places, a unique setpiece that simultaneously moves the plot forward and the quickfire change of setting is brisk and – most importantly – entertaining. Much has been made of the film’s 01:45 runtime (the shortest in MCU history), and I have to say it felt refreshing; there wasn’t much bloat in the film, with very few moments that overstayed their welcome. 
 
When we rank all the Marvel movies, The Marvels isn’t at the bottom, but it’s nearer to the bottom of the middle. There was something alchemical about those early movies, especially the unsurpassed best, The Winter Soldier. No, The Marvels is nearer to something like Thor: The Dark World, meat-and-potatoes superheroics largely unconcerned with the wider tapestry. It’s fine, but it’s fun. It is not a film that I will rush to see again, but if we assess the MCU entries in terms of how long I smiled and how many times I laughed, I suspect The Marvels would register somewhere near the top ten.
 

The Marvels is rated PG-13 for “action/violence and brief language.” Directed by Nia DaCosta. Written by Nia DaCosta, Megan McDonnell, and Elissa Karasik. Based on the Marvel Comics. Starring Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Captain Marvel (2019)

Twenty-one movies in, the Marvel Cinematic Universe makes winning look effortless. As its original crop of Avengers begins to rotate out (so we assume), Marvel’s been marching toward Avengers: Endgame with the dually unenviable tasks of wrapping up a decade’s worth of stories while seeding another decade’s. With Captain Marvel, the franchise tries so many new things that it’s a wonder the film seems so comfortable, with its star Brie Larson feeling right at home as the hero who’s always already been woven into the Marvel tapestry.

Circa 1995, the Kree warrior Vers (Larson) crashlands on Earth, where she’s met by rising SHIELD agent Nicholas Fury (a de-aged Samuel L. Jackson). Fury is understandably baffled by her stories of intergalactic war and an invading army of Skrull shapeshifters, but it’s Vers who finds herself jumbled by impossible memories of a life on earth. As her commanding officer (Jude Law) sets out to rescue his protégé, the Skrull leader Talos (Ben Mendelsohn) searches earth for a device that will turn the tide in his peoples’ war against the Kree.

It used to be that the phrase “comic booky” was thrown around derisively, to cast the aspersion that a film emulated the gaudiest, most puerile impulses of the medium. Now, however, I’m comfortable saying that Captain Marvel is the best kind of “comic booky” movie, in the sense that it packs in an expansive mythology, replete with nods forward and backward to the MCU’s continuity (Djimon Hounsou and Lee Pace reprise – or is it preprise? – their roles as Korath and Ronan from Guardians of the Galaxy). It’s also delightfully comic booky in its use of the cinematic screen as a comics frame, with visual images overlapping and echoing in a way that reminds me of how well Zack Snyder mastered the technique in Watchmen; directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck manage to communicate almost exclusively visually, as in the myriad ways they use, for example, the color of blood to indicate chronology, revelation, and memory. 

Moreover, Captain Marvel is exceedingly comic booky for its willingness to reinvent what came before. I won’t spoil any of the film’s big twists, but suffice it to say that the movie’s Captain Marvel does not have the same secret origin as she does in the comics, largely because the comics are as tangled, refracted, and impenetrable as the stereotypes portend. In streamlining and refashioning, though, this Captain Marvel’s origin echoes all the versions from the comics and repurposes the story into something new and potent, something that works for this character and for the trajectory of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With its mid-90s setting, the film does fascinating work fitting into this long-running story, particularly with young agents Nick Fury and Phil Coulson.

But the film is rightfully Brie Larson’s, and she is far and away dynamite as the woman who would be Captain Marvel. Her performance is being compared to Gal Gadot’s in Wonder Woman or to Chadwick Boseman’s in Black Panther, but I think she’s much closer to Chris Evans in Captain America: The Winter Soldier – coming into herself with ease and a grin, effortlessly comfortable with herself and her friends even as her world is changing seismically around her. She’s funny, she’s confident, and she’s able to sell the trust and intimacy that comes with the kind of deep friendship she forms with Fury and others. It’s the kind of performance that can carry a franchise quite readily, and I for one am ready for Captain Marvel 2 (Kree Boogaloo?).

Special shout-out section: Samuel L. Jackson is a blast as a young Nick Fury. We get to see shades of the hardline Director Fury, but his youth and inexperience lets some of the Sam Jackson charm trickle in, and we never tire of seeing him cozy up with Goose the cat. Ben Mendelsohn is buckets of fun as Talos, who’s got more personality than a lot of unmemorable Marvel villains; Mendelsohn’s play with accents and his dexterous hand at manipulating his Skrull prosthetics make me hope that if/when the Skrulls do return, Mendelsohn will pop back into the MCU. Finally, much has been made of the fact that Pinar Toprak is the MCU’s first female composer, and she turns in a pretty exciting score. The music has often been a sticking point for Marvel, who are usually criticized for bland forgettable scores, but I’ve loved most of them and hope to hear more from Toprak in the future. Like Larson, she fits right in.

The Winter Soldier remains the gold standard for me, but Captain Marvel continues very nicely the easy-winning streak of debut films like Doctor Strange and Black Panther. It’s a movie with plenty of surprises, for newcomers and true believers alike, and it clicks into place with the delicate precision of the best comic book “retcons,” asking us to look back at the past and wonder if it really happened the way we think it did. At one point in the credits, we’re promised “Captain Marvel will return” – though where precisely, I shan’t spoil – as if we had any doubt that Marvel’s latest gamble would have a long-running payoff. Marvel has been on a real winning streak, and for a character whose namesake is, in a way, the very studio that’s introducing her, Captain Marvel is another success.

Captain Marvel is rated PG-13 for “sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and brief suggestive language.” Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Written by Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck, and Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Nicole Perlman, and Meg LeFauve. Based on the Marvel Comics by Stan Lee, Gene Colan, Roy Thomas, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and David López. Starring Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Ben Mendelsohn, Lashana Lynch, Annette Bening, Clark Gregg, and Jude Law.

Kong: Skull Island (2017)

For an early March release starring a giant computer-generated ape and a jukebox soundtrack to make Suicide Squad blush, designed to be the second installment in an ongoing yet untested franchise, Kong: Skull Island is far better than it has any right to be. While far from the second coming of monster movies, it’s worth a look because of its fun use of the adventure horror genre with a cast that is never less than engaging.

What is the secret of Skull Island? In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, a government researcher (John Goodman) assembles a team for an expedition to the mysterious landmass – including a British tracker (Tom Hiddleston), a military escort (Samuel L. Jackson), and a war photographer (Brie Larson). However, not everyone on the team knows that Skull Island is home to the colossal Kong, a mighty ape who’s far from the least of their worries.

I’ve seen a lot of critics lament the belabored point that Kong: Skull Island does not live up to the original 1933 film, to which I have to say – is it supposed to? Isn’t this a bit like complaining that your girlfriend’s recipe for apple pie can’t compare to the one that’s been in your family for generations? And as apple pies go, Kong: Skull Island is a real peach of a pie. I laughed, I held my breath, and I thrilled to the spectacle (and seeing it in an immersive 3D IMAX experience didn’t hurt). It’s popcorn fun at its finest.

Kong: Skull Island is exuberantly fun, enthusiastic about its content, but more importantly it gets the audience on board with that with equal fervor. After an opening scene that ably demonstrates the scope of the action, the film stages several scenes of character development – admittedly, this isn’t War & Peace, and the characters aren’t exactly breaking any molds, but the performers are having so much fun nibbling on the scenery that it’s easy to play along. Once we get to Skull Island, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts stages a number of very engrossing set pieces that I’ve called adventure horror – think Pirates of the Caribbean by way of Alien, Stephen King’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. Kong: Skull Island mixes the period piece atmosphere of a comedic adventure film with the sudden onset of terrifying dread as these funny characters find themselves in genuinely perilous situations, and it’s to Vogt-Roberts’s credit that these tonal shifts manage not to feel disjointed.

I’ve said that the character work in Kong: Skull Island won’t dazzle you with originality, but again, in a film that stars King Kong, I’m not sure they need to do so. And the good news is that Kong is really quite stunning, like the recent Planet of the Apes movies on steroids. While I was aware that Kong has been, for lack of a better term, embiggened so that he can eventually go toe-to-toe with Godzilla in a sequel down the pike, I couldn’t help feeling that a larger Kong was what set this one apart and justified another Kong film. (I was surprised, however, to read that we’ve had fewer than ten King Kong films since 1933. That number seems low to me.) That larger Kong motivates our characters to react differently to him; he’s no longer a sideshow attraction to be captured and tamed. He’s a dangerous monster, either an object of fear or a massive target to kill. Tom Hiddleston does broody and British as well as ever, tracking and understanding Kong, while Brie Larson gets to do a fun updated riff on the Fay Wray “damsel” who draws Kong’s eye in a way that feels fresh and more female-friendly than before. While Shea Whigham ends up stealing the show with his blissfully oblivious army captain, it’s Samuel L. Jackson’s eyes themselves who become a star attraction. Frequently shot in intense close-ups that look like something out of a samurai revenge film, Jackson’s eyes play the fury of Preston Packard like Captain Ahab by way of Colonel Kurtz, pitted to perfection against the deftly-animated human-like peepers of our snarling simian star.

To tell you the truth – I never lie, dear reader – I am not all that thrilled with the idea of King Kong vs. Godzilla, which feels a little bit like another studio’s attempt to crib the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s success by building yet one more franchised shared universe. I’m not opposed to the idea in principle, and you’ll probably see a review of Godzilla vs. Kong right here in 2020, if all goes well. But the truth of the matter is that I enjoyed Kong: Skull Island so much as a standalone that I’d rather not look too far forward just yet. Let me enjoy this one for a while, and if there’s more of the same coming down the river, all the better.

Kong: Skull Island is rated PG-13 for “intense sequences of sci-fi violence and action, and for brief strong language.” Directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts. Written by John Gatins, Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, and Derek Connolly. Starring Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, John Goodman, Brie Larson, and John C. Reilly.

The Gambler (2014)

Wherefore art thou, William Monahan?  Whither went the man who won an Oscar for the screenplay to my single favorite movie of all time, The Departed?  Well, it seems we know; he had a hand in the dismal Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, and now this.  The Gambler isn’t on par with the disappointing and ultimately unnecessary Sin City sequel, largely on the strength of the performances, but it is a tragically unengaging affair.

Mark Wahlberg stars as Jim Bennett, a literature professor and novelist with a gambling addiction and a laundry list of sharks (Michael K. Williams and John Goodman among them) to whom he owes money.  While he wrestles with his debts, he borrows money from his mother (Jessica Lange) and enters into a semi-illicit romance with one of his top students (Brie Larson).

As someone who has taught literature at the college level for some time now, I must begin by saying that the classroom scenes in The Gambler are halfhearted at best and, at worst, horribly ill-conceived.  They seem to serve only to introduce the character of Lamar so that he can be in place for the climax of the film, because top student Amy (more about whom, later) doesn’t contribute much.  It’s evident that Monahan hasn’t set foot in a classroom in a very long time, even setting aside the utter absurdity of placing Camus next to Shakespeare on a survey course syllabus.  Bennett’s class sessions, which oscillate between a packed lecture hall and a group of barely ten students, are longwinded, unfocused, with little to no actual literary content; instead, Bennett insufferably berates his students and himself until dismissing them early because one is sick of the other.

Maybe that’s the point, you suggest, to which I’m willing to listen – at which point, however, I respond that the very characterization of Jim Bennett is a colossal misstep.  Either he’s deliberately unlikeable, or Monahan’s script has failed the character.  I’m inclined to think the latter based on the film’s conclusion.  Without spoiling anything, the character pulls off an eleventh-hour personality change and becomes really quite clever – this after two hours of the gambling equivalent of Leaving Las Vegas.  I’m sorry, Gambler, you can’t be both an unflinching look at the woes of addiction and then go for the Hollywood ending.

Then there’s the whole problem with Larson’s character.  As near as I can tell, the sum purpose of her character is that Amy is someone with whom Mark Wahlberg’s character can have sex.  I’d forgive the script the intensely problematic aspect that Bennett has a relationship with a student if the script didn’t explicitly point out how inappropriate this is and then proceed to do nothing with that detail.  The worse crime is that the character is virtually devoid of personality and could be removed from the film entirely without any impact on the plot whatsoever.

None of this, incidentally, is the cast’s fault.  Wahlberg, Williams, and especially Goodman all turn in grand performances, and if the production starred rank amateurs I’d have walked out.  This holy trinity, however, does the best they can with the material, and my faith in them maybe even elevates the material.  There are a few really snappily-written monologues in the film, mostly leading up to scenes in which Bennett borrows money, monologues that make me long for the William Monahan with whom I fell in screenplay love.

If you’ll indulge the concluding pun, I think The Gambler is something of a gamble for moviegoers.  Either you’ll have the patience for the uneven screenplay or you won’t, but the game is rigged in favor of an unearned Hollywood ending amid a host of master showmen brandishing their hands.

The Gambler is rated R for “language throughout, and for some sexuality/nudity.”  The language is as salty as the popcorn, rife with the F-word, and a brief scene in a strip club shows topless women.  Wahlberg gets roughed up a bit by the folks to whom he owes money.