Captain Marvel Makes Her Debut

Captain Marvel (2019) ★★½ Brie Larson, Samuel L. Jackson, Jude Law, Djimon Hounsou, Annette Benning.

Captain Marvel burst onto the big screen in a big way this month, with a post-credits sequence setting up the titular character as a major force to be reckoned with in the upcoming Avengers: Endgame. 

Having never liked the comic book, this was one Marvel movie I was not looking forward to. Having seen it, I am pleased to report that I liked it better than I thought I would, but not as much as I had hoped.

Here’s what I liked: Annette Benning, chewing the scenery and looking great; Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury with two good eyes; Goose the non-cat; Agent Coulson; the sinister and creeping-looking Skrulls; Stan Lee’s inside-joke cameo as himself (the year is 1995 and Lee is seen on a train reading the script to Kevin Smith’s Mallrats, in which he had a cameo); and Brie Larson, a talented actress who holds her own in a performance with dangerously high fanboy expectations.

As for the rest? Not as impressed. I found the film a tad too long; the movie could have been trimmed by about 14 minutes, which would account for the period of time I dozed and missed nothing that affected my ability to follow the plot. The action sequences are spectacular but uninspired. The special effects are, as expected, top-notch, and continue the Marvel tradition of digitally de-aging its characters (Jeff Bridges in Ant-Man and the Wasp, for example), in this case rendering Jackson as he was nearly 25 years ago.

And since when are the Skrulls (created by Stan Lee in Fantastic Four #2) the good guys? I thought they looked too much like Orcs from The Lord of the Rings, but liked them in this film (as villains) until they eventually become the sympathetic victims. Fortunately, the cast, which includes Jude Law as a mentor to Brie’s character Vers, rises above Captain Marvel’s shortcomings with solid and compelling performances.

Captain Marvel is a fun popcorn superhero movie with all of action and humor you’d expect from the Marvel Universe. But in the pantheon of Marvel features it ranks well below the Avengers series, Black Panther, the Iron Man films, and Doctor Strange, but slightly above all Fantastic Four and Punisher movies. (1990’s Captain America has to be the worst of all Marvel films). I wouldn’t call this movie a miss. Just a bit off target.