The Marvels

Grade: C

The Marvel train will never stop, but I am increasingly more selective about how often I choose to be a passenger. I threw Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: Far from Home a bone with the most favorable possible ratings I could give, but my benefit of the doubt has run out. The Marvels isn’t terrible (it’s not even my least favorite one of these), but as usual, there’s not much that’s interesting. Mercifully, this one is short, at just an hour and 45 minutes.

The Marvels is the first teaming up of Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) with Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris from WandaVision) and Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel (a show-stealing Iman Vellani). Kamala Khan is Vellani’s only role so far. She responded to an open casting call on WhatsApp, and the rest is history. She’s a tremendous performer, and deserves a career beyond the MCU gravy train. These three ladies work well together, when they’re allowed to have dialogue, personalities, and chemistry – and not flying away from computer generated geysers. One of the plot points is there’s a glitch with a teleportation portal that causes the three Marvels to swap places with each other. They have fun with this on the spaceship while juggling or doing double Dutch jump rope.

Music is well-utilized. My favorite song usage was the one that played during the montage of all the cats “storing” the crew members to save room. There’s a sequence where the Marvels go to a city where the townspeople only communicate by singing. When one of them does speak, they call that “bilingual.”

As usual with these movies, they can’t seem to wrap everything up before the end credits. Just when I’m ready to celebrate making it through another one, it turns out we weren’t done. These scenes are sometimes called credit cookies, but in the MCU, they go down like credit rice cakes. I may pop in from time to time in the future to see if lightning happens to strike, but otherwise, you won’t find me at a Marvel movie unless it’s nominated for significant Oscars, or there’s somebody in it I fancy.

Grade: C