The Marvels

Our Review

The shortest Marvel movie ever made, which turns out to be both its identity and its epitaph. The Marvels runs 105 minutes, and it moves like a pilot for a series that was canceled mid production: three heroes, one villain, a mystery about wormholes, and a finale that cuts to black right when a real third act should start. Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers, Teyonah Parris’s Monica Rambeau, and Iman Vellani’s Kamala Khan share a light swapping mechanic, every power use trades their bodies across space, and the film mines real comedy and real choreography from it in the training montage and the planet hopping fight.

Vellani is the find. Kamala Khan’s fangirl glee at standing beside her idol powers the film’s every warm moment, and her family, imported intact from the Disney+ show, grounds the Pakistani wedding sequence that gives the middle its charm. Zawe Ashton’s Dar-Benn is a bargain basement accuser with a Kree grievance, a villain of pure plot function, and the film gives her nothing to fear or mourn.

The box office was the franchise’s worst ever, a collapse that had as much to do with superhero saturation and the strikes as with the film, which is middling rather than bad. The midcredits sting, a new mutant universe’s most famous face arriving, deserved a better movie around it.

Our score: 4/10, thin but likable.