Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Marvels’ on Disney+, an Uber-Goofy MCU Outing That’s Not As Bad As You Have Probably Heard

The Marvels (now streaming on Disney+) arrived in theaters just as the comic book movie genre was being intubated. What might have been the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s holiday-season smash instead was a box office dud, grossing just shy of $200 million worldwide. That’s not great for a movie with a reported $270 million budget, a number that shocked me, since the movie looks like (gets out a calculator, presses some buttons, scratches noggin) about $73.6 million. WHAT are they spending their money on? It’s like one of those government-contract scams where your tax dollars go toward buying a $375 four-pack of AA batteries or whatever. Anyway, this is the 33rd MCU movie, and that right there is probably the problem – a number that suggests bloat and arrogance from Disney/Marvel and growing ennui from audiences. Why ennui? Well, you only need to have watched 2019’s Captain Marvel movie and Disney+ series Secret Invasion, Wandavision and Ms. Marvel to fully understand The Marvels, along with the implied assertion that you should’ve seen everything else in the MCU too in order to REALLY TRULY understand it (hey watch out for some surprise cameos!). But! I can attest that you don’t need to have studied too hard for this test, because I got by OK despite being a serial MCU class-skipper. Hopefully you’ll find that encouraging? 

THE MARVELS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A CELESTIAL BODY. A SPACESHIP. A SPACE PORTAL. A GREENSCREEN SOUNDSTAGE. A SILLY COSTUME. A GLOWING THINGY. There’s always a thingy in these movies. In this case, a gauntlet, worn by Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton). It gives her great power, of course. Always with the great power thingies! She says something about how there should be two of them, because this particular thingy comes in pairs. CUT TO: Jersey City. This is where Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) lives. She has the other gauntlet, because her grandmother gave it to her. One assumes her grandmother didn’t know it was a “quantum band,” as it’s referred to in the dialogue, and I think that’s a reference to that one Ant-Man movie where they made a joke about how you just stick the word “quantum” in front of something to make it seem more important. Should’ve called it a cosmic band, I say. But you know, everything in the MCU is totally connected, even the throwaway jokes.

Anyway. Kamala, as you damn sure better know by now, is the Ms. Marvel from the Ms. Marvel series, so if any powerful alien lady shows up looking for the “quantum band” Kamala might be able to put up a fight. Notably, Kamala named her superhero alter-ego after Captain Marvel (Bree Larson), because she fangirls over the famed cosmic heroine really hard, like how you imagine a stereotypical Swiftie pines to be BFFs with Tay-Tay. Wouldn’t it be WILD if she actually got to MEET her? Well, hold on a sec with that cosmic fantasy, I have some further exposition to share: Captain Marvel is out in outer space conducting official outer space business. And remember – as you damn well better know by now! – from the Captain Marvel movie when her best friend had a cute daughter? Well, she’s the adult Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) these days, an astronaut now who works for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). And as you damn well etc. etc. from Wandavision, she also has super powers. Those powers are a lot like Captain Marvel’s and also a lot like Ms. Marvel’s, which seems unlikely, but hey, some ridiculous contrived plot development has to bring these three together to be the collective thing in the title of the movie.

And that contrivance is an oh-no-not-that-anything-but-that problem, “a surge in the jump point system.” Whatever that is. I think it’s a “quantum” thing. A cosmic thing. It has something to do with a hole opening up in the grid of hexagonal plates that space itself consists of so ships can travel through the hole? I just see a lot of hexagons in the CGI here. I even counted the sides so I know there’s six on each space-plate. This is all beyond our understanding, and it doesn’t matter at all but what does matter is that the anomaly, and the sameness of the three principals’ powers, means they keep switching places in the space-time continuum. Like, Captain Marvel ends up in Kamala’s bedroom, looking at the notebook drawings of the two of them hugging, and Kamala ends up wherever Monica is, etc. This is something I refer to as “quantum inconvenience.” 

Wait, wasn’t there a villain involved? Yes. Dar-Benn wants the other thingy so she can be powerful, and she also wants to kill the alien Skrull race and steal their resources because her people, the Kree, are in trouble because the star near their planet is dying. She also refers to Captain Marvel as “The Annihilator,” so one assumes they have a tragic past, NO SPOILERS though. Dar-Benn’s diabolical scheming coincides with the wacky place-swapping among our cosmic trio, who must team up – despite some unfinished-business tension between Captain Marvel and Monica – to try to solve their problem at the same time they try to stop Dar-Benn. Meanwhile, remember the cat from Captain Marvel with the super-secret-surprise tentacles that leap out of its mouth? You damn well etc. should, and he’s still around doing the tentacle thing, which is just the type of goofy visual gag that balances out the villain’s attempts to enact genocide against a rival people. Gotta make sure the awful stuff is frequently interspersed with weird slapstick lest we not get whiplash while watching this movie. Cosmic whiplash.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Marvels taps into the previously established – note: EVERYTHING in the MCU is previously established by now – goofy tone set by the Ant-Mans and the last couple Thors, without getting uber-goofy like some of them did. And so, here’s the definitive ranking of all the Goofy-Ass MCU Movies!

5. Thor: Love and Thunder – Ugh, super-annoying, go away

4. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania – MODOK sez this thing sux

3. The Marvels – Messy but OK

2. Ant-Man – Still moderately amusing (note: Ant-Man and the Wasp wasn’t wacky enough to be included in this list)

1. Thor: Ragnarok – This one grew on me after my kid watched it 137 times

Performance Worth Watching: The world has loved Vellani’s golly-gee-whiz take on the Ms. Marvel character since the series’ 2022 debut, and I’ll join the chorus. She’s tightly tuned to the upbeat tone director Nia DaCosta cultivates here. If I were buried in MCU content I haven’t watched yet and had to chew my way out, I’d eat Ms. Marvel first.

Memorable Dialogue: Monica reminds us what happened in Wandavision when she got her superpowers, in case we all forgot (note: I had totally forgotten):

Monica: I walked through a radiation-shielding barrier of a witch hex and now I can manipulate and see all wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Kamala’s mom: I’m very happy for you.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: They should’ve tried running the defrag tool on the universe. That might’ve put all the hexagons back together. But noooooooo, that’d be too easy, and not violent enough to maintain our attention. It always has to come down to a fistfight and a whole lotta CGI. That’s the MCU formula, and in the wake of The Marvels’ theatrical floparoo, DaCosta was kind of thrown under the bus apparently for not adhering to that formula – Disney execs essentially said she wasn’t being micromanaged enough during production (the type of oversight, one presumes, that drove Edgar Wright away from Ant-Man a decade ago). 

Frankly, she’s not the problem. Her direction is spirited at times, and her stylistic stamp is on the funnier, most enjoyable action sequences, most notably a zappy, cleverly choreographed first-act triple-character wormholed switcheroo that’ll have you giggling. She also kindles enough palling-around team-up chemistry among the three leads to enliven some of the quieter scenes – although oddly, Larsen’s character feels underdeveloped, the de-facto headliner disappointingly left as something of an afterthought.

No, the primary problem with the slightly-sloppy-but-otherwise-watchable The Marvels has less to do with the movie itself, more to do with the burden of it being part of a massive franchise that’s starting to crumble under its own massive weight. It’s a fairly slight movie, but there’s nothing wrong with aiming for laughs by embracing silliness and maintaining a featherweight tone – e.g., the extra-weird, just-go-with-it sequence where our heroes visit a planet whose inhabitants only communicate via song and dance, which at least is something we haven’t seen in an MCU movie before.

That type of flightiness likely doesn’t go over well for audiences shelling out for the increasingly spendy theatrical experience – I picture people filing out of the megaplex, shrugging their shoulders and wondering if it was worth the effort and expenditure. But I can see The Marvels playing quite well at home with everyone in their soft pants horking down popcorn that didn’t cost $27, and not worrying so much about where everything fits into the increasingly complicated MCU continuity labyrinth. Disney may have squandered hundreds of millions on cat hijinks and CG hexagon grids, but that’s not our problem, not in the least.

Our Call: Where was I? Right – trying to remember that we should be talking about the movie itself instead of the Everest-sized mountain of context that weighs down MCU “content” like lead weights strapped to a swimmer’s ankles. The Marvels is fine! Just fine. Don’t expect too much, and it won’t under-deliver. STREAM IT.  

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.