Nia DaCosta’s Captain Marvel sequel is short, cheerful and often funny, and Iman Vellani is a delight in it. It is also cut to ribbons in its first half hour and never finds a story to hold its three heroines together.
Nia DaCosta’s The Marvels is the sequel to Captain Marvel (2019), and two of its three leads were introduced on television, in WandaVision and Ms. Marvel. It has 105 minutes to catch everyone up and then get on with it, and does the second part better than the first. It is short, bright and good-natured, with a first-rate comic performance, and at the forty-minute mark we could not have told you what anyone was trying to do or why.
The setup is a good one. Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) and Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) find their powers have become tangled, so that whenever one of them uses hers she changes places with another. A fight in Kamala’s bedroom becomes a fight on a Kree ship becomes a fight on Nick Fury’s space station. Evan Schiff and Catrin Hedström cut this so that each swap lands on a matched frame, a fist here finishing a punch begun somewhere else, and for that sequence the film knows what it is. Then it has to explain the villain.
Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) is a Kree commander whose home planet is dying, and who has a bangle that matches Kamala’s and uses it to rip holes in space. Ashton plays her with a clenched, wounded fury and is given nothing to spend it on. The script, by Megan McDonnell, DaCosta and Elissa Karasik, states her grievance once, sends her to the next planet and leaves it there. Her quarrel with Carol ought to be the film’s spine and gets a flashback and a couple of lines.
The first half hour is the real casualty. The cutting that works so well in the swap fight is applied to everything, so scenes are set up and abandoned in a handful of shots, and Fury and Monica trade exposition while the picture jumps to New Jersey and back. We were properly lost, and not in the way a puzzle film means you to be. Sean Bobbitt lights the station and the Kree ship in the flat, even glow that has become this franchise’s default, and only lets a frame breathe once the film leaves them.
When it leaves them it is often lovely. There is a planet where everyone communicates in song, and the film treats it as a chance rather than a joke. Cara Brower dresses the place in pinks and golds, Lindsay Pugh puts the three heroines in gowns of ascending absurdity, Laura Karpman’s score turns into a full number, and Park Seo-jun’s Prince Yan sings his diplomacy with a straight face. We laughed properly, and we laughed again at a space station full of Flerkens, the cats with tentacles in their mouths, put to work on a logistics problem while the soundtrack does something quite wrong.
Vellani is the other reason. She plays Kamala as a fan who has got inside the film she loves and cannot believe her luck, and delivers every line a half-beat too fast, as though someone might ask her to leave. Larson has been asked to play a woman who is tired and guilty, and the film keeps cutting away from her before either shows. Parris, whose resentment of Carol the script raises and then forgets, is dignified and underused. Kamala’s parents (Zenobia Shroff, Mohan Kapur) and brother (Saagar Shaikh) turn up in the second half and are funnier than anything the plot is doing.
When a planet’s sun was at stake, we found we did not mind, which is a strange thing to report about a film that has spent so much on the sun. Dar-Benn has been given a reason and no interior, and the people she is threatening are extras in matching robes. The film hurries past its own catastrophe to get to the next joke, and the jokes are better, so we can see why.
Against Captain Marvel, which was stiff but knew what it was about, this is looser, warmer and a good deal less sure. It runs 105 minutes, which in this series counts as mercy, and it carries a 12A. See it for Vellani and the singing, at home, with somebody who can explain the bangle.
