Review: Captain Marvel

It's tempting to say Captain Marvel has arrived just a little too late. Marvel's strange reluctance to put a female character front and center in one of their films went on too long for them to score any brownie points now, but better late than never; the real problem is that this 90s-set movie feels like a superhero film that would have wowed audiences in 2009, and we've all changed a lot since Iron Man.

Like just about every Marvel movie of the last few years, the story (and character) feels like one step forward, one step back. There's the retro soundtrack and space strangeness of Guardians of the Galaxy, only now with the comedy double act of Thor: Ragnarok. Carol Danvers AKA Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) has both kinds of Marvel superhero powers: she can physically fight, and she can also shoot energy beams (and eventually, fly). The story seems straightforward, but there's just enough in the way of twists to keep things interesting until the action sequences (which are not interesting) kick in. At least the bad guys are decent.

Danvers herself is quick with a quip and approaches her job with a very Buffy-like combination of competence and ease. She's initially part of a Kree Empire military unit (led by Jude Law) who finds herself cut off on Earth and teaming up with S.H.I.E.L.D. pen pusher Nick Fury (a CGI de-aged Samuel L Jackson) against an infiltration of shape-shifting Skrulls (led by Ben Mendelsohn, using his Aussie accent to charming effect). It's a slightly odd mix of 2019 space action and 1995 paranoid TV drama complete with underground military base, and if the "1995" this takes place in is just a thrown together collection of kinda sorta vague references, who cares so long as we're all having fun, right?

So as a corporately-mandated origin story for a character designed to replace... let's say Iron Man?... in the next wave of Marvel films, this undoubtedly does its job. And there are definitely enough fun moments scattered throughout the film to make it worth the price of admission. But as an actual feature film that's telling a story? It's a bit shoddy.

Early scenes do a good job of setting Danvers up as someone who's lost her past, but when she gets it back she barely seems interested in it (and why would she be? It's basically "bad home life, became a test pilot"). At least that's more of an arc than Fury gets, and while he and Danver have some ok banter there's never much real chemistry between them - which may be the fault of the otherwise impressively seamless CGI taking 30 years off Jackson's face.

Larson does have strong chemistry with Law, which is nice yet throws part of the film off kilter, and she always seems slightly more comfortable during the rare serious moments than she is with the playful side of things. Mendelsohn is, unsurprisingly, the best thing in the film and sells a development that could otherwise have skewed the story badly with an effortlessness that shows just how good these Marvel films really could be if they weren't so constrained by their own conventions.

Captain Marvel is a mid-tier Marvel movie - it doesn't get anything seriously wrong, but it rarely gets anything especially right. Like most of their recent origin films, it feels more like its mission is to set up a character to carry the Marvel corporate universe forward than tell a story anyone felt really needed to be told. Maybe if Disney found a few more directors who could actually handle decent fights things would improve: for a genre based almost entirely around people doing impossible things, this is yet another Marvel movie where the action - whether on the ground or in the air - is all-too-grounded.

- Anthony Morris