“Captain Marvel” is the latest cinematic release from Marvel Studios. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck directed this film which they co-wrote alongside Geneva Robertson-Dworet. Brie Larson tales on the title role alongside Samuel L. Jackson, Clark Gregg, Jude Law, and Annette Benning.
The movie starts off with the introduction of a Starforce member named Vers who is in service to protect the Kree Empire. When a mission brings her to 1995 Earth, she meets Nick Fury and Phil Coulson of SHIELD an is even more baffled to find memories being stoked of a prior life as Carol Danvers, an Air Force pilot who had been presumed dead six years earlier. Carol brings an impressive array of superpowers with her but has no memory of how she acquired them. She also finds that her real home has been caught between a conflict between the Kree and another race known as the Skrull, but it no longer becomes clear which side she should be on for a time.
Captain Marvel suffers a bit from seeming too invulnerable. Once she masters her abilities, the villains really don’t seem to be that much of a threat, which rather removes any sense of real tension. Jude Law plays her mentor initially, named Yon-Rogg, however it doesn’t take long to realize that he has a darker agenda. Jackson ends up, rather unsurprisingly, being the best addition to the cast. He has been playing Fury for quite a few years in the Marvel films, but the audience gets to see a younger and less cynical version. Larson is fine, I suppose. I don’t think the writing really served her talents all that effectively. She has a few amusing lines, but her delivery seemed a bit off to me. It took me quite a while to get all that engaged by her performance. There just seemed something to be rather by the numbers in this latest superhero origin story.
The visual effects were pretty spectacular, but that is getting to be pretty par for the course in these installments. I just found the whole experience to be rather bland overall. Jackson is always good, but he was merely a major reason why I didn’t dislike this movie more, but that shouldn’t be the goal of any actor in any film.
It’s a very uneven movie that left me vacillating between finding it tolerable and agreeing with other criticisms I had heard. It works well enough as part of the Marvel film series for the most part, but it ended up merely being not that bad where it should have been better.
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