Yes, the movie’s a bit cheesy – but Brie’s a Marvellous new pin-up for the sisterhood
THERE have been 20 films in the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe – whose superheroes have earned squillions at the box office – and none of them has had a female lead, until now.
The title character in Captain Marvel is played by Brie Larson, a prominent champion for genderequality in Hollywood since winning an Academy Award for her performance in the 2015 abduction thriller Room.
Well, now she’s given feminists everywhere a spectacular new pin-up, as a jet-heeled superhero with fists that can thump practically any man into the middle of next week.
The key word, however, is ‘practically’. It takes the best part of this movie’s two hours or so running time (hallelujah, by the way, for a Marvel blockbuster that doesn’t make you wish you’d brought a pillow and a chamber-pot) for her superpowers to be fully unleashed.
At the distinctly Star Trekky start of the film, she cannot quite overcome her condescending mentor, Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), in martial arts sessions. He wants her to control her emotions, which can’t be easy, because she also has to stomach his platitudes. ‘I want you to be the best version of yourself,’ he says, like a NewAgey schoolteacher.
The pair of them are Kree, inhabitants of the planet Hala, where he runs an elite military unit called the Starforce. She, answering to the name Vers, is thrust into front-line action against a pointyeared alien race called the Skrulls, which winds up with her hurtling through the galaxy to the planet she knows as C-53, and we know as Earth.
It is 1995 and she crash-lands on top of a Blockbuster Video store, abiding by that law of the movies which decrees that crash-landings from outer- space always have to happen in Californian shopping malls.
Like the Kree but with different motives, the Skrulls, led by a wisecracking cove called Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), are trying to find an entity known as the Supreme Intelligence, which thus far appears embodied in the twinkly-eyed form of Annette Bening (are you keeping up!).
SOON, an operative with the covert US government agency SHIELD arrives on the scene. This is Nick Fury, played once again by Samuel L Jackson, for whom digital effects wreak a miracle that syringes of Botox never could, making him look 30 years younger than in his previous outings in the role.
As all Marvel fans know, Fury is destined to end up as SHIELD’s eye-patched director, dishing out save-the-world-from-Armageddon jobs to the Avengers.
So this is his ‘ origin story’ as well as Captain Marvel’s; we even find out how he loses his eye. In the meantime, he and Vers team up to deal with the Skrulls, which is tricky, because the slippery so-and-sos can metamorphose at any time into anyone or anything. And as if that weren’t enough to be getting on with, Vers learns how she acquired her name – it derives from Carol Danvers, the US airforce pilot she used to be before she was adopted by the Kree.
With this realisation comes a barrage of random memories of her previous life, leading her to an emotional reunion with her former best friend and fellow pilot, Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch).
As befits a woman called Brie, Larson brings a fair bit of cheesiness to these scenes, indeed the film generally makes a cheese-heavy meal of female friendship. There’s no romantic sub-plot; the love story is all about the sisterhood.
Also, those clever folk in the bells-andwhistles department are not quite at the top of their game. There’s an overdose of special effects, which somehow leeches the suspense from the climactic battle scene.
on the other hand, writer- directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (whose last collaboration was 2015’s wonderful Mississippi Grind) keep it all bombing along very watchably, handle a series of narrative twists cleverly, and make the most of the Nineties setting with some smart visual gags about CD-roms and all the things we thought back then were the very essence of cutting-edge.
Captain Marvel isn’t exactly marvellous. But it doesn’t disappoint, either.
Captain Marvel opens at cinemas across the UK on Friday