‘The Marvels‘ continues the MCU tailspin into mediocracy with a poorly rewritten and edited film where the blame lays solely on the studio.
The once untouchable Marvel Studios, even with some of their nonsensical images like Captain America changing grips from a lat hold to a bicep curl to hold on to an elevator and the first ‘Ant-Man‘ movie essentially being ‘Iron Man‘ on a much smaller scale, Disney has somehow become the studio with, “go away heat.”
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Fear of constant reshoots, rewrites, director Nia DaCosta’s early departure and release date delays always puts fans and critics on edge and our worst fears come to fruition with ‘The Marvels‘, a sequel to the horrendous, ‘Captain Marvel‘ from 2019. Please, don’t get me started on ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,’, which made ‘Captain Marvel‘ look like ‘Captain America: Winter Soldier.’
Marvel Studios has been on a decline since the start of Phase 4 and seem to be unable to pull up. The interlocking of films, which was once charming, until forcing people to watch the Disney+ shows to fill in the gaps in missing content was pulled from the Marvel Comics playbook of Civil War and Secret Invasion, which I totally fell for, going from a six-issue mini-series to having to buy all the tie-ins, leading to 40 plus comics.
Unfortunately, where Marvel tries to tie ‘The Marvels‘ back into, ‘Avengers: Endgame‘ falters. The stakes are never high, the jokes are flat and quite frankly if not for Ms. Marvel aka Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) and Photon aka Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) I would have walked out of the film. Brie Larson is…there, I guess.
This is one big, deformed, Frankenstein monster of a movie that had no idea the direction it was going and anything that could have been interesting was cut short. I wish I could remember the stakes or even who the villain, but I was so lost in the convoluted storytelling that I had to tune out, thinking, “Well, the colors are pretty. Iman has the best character in this story.”
Sadly, with ‘The Marvels‘ being the shortest Marvel film ever produced, it feels like the longest. This flick is the true definition of, “We’ll fix it in post.” It is a deformed, Frankenstein monster of a movie that was spliced together from various script iterations and the moment where it could get interesting, deviates into a groaning moment.
‘The Marvels‘ comes to theaters on Friday, November 10, 2023, but wait for Disney+ to watch it, because this franchise needs an adrenaline injection.
Summary
‘The Marvels‘ if not for Iman Vellani and Teyonah Parris the movie should have been called, “Eh, We’ll Fix It In Post.”
