105 min | PG-13 | November 10, 2023 | Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Three heroes with light-based powers find themselves swapping places every time they use them. Captain Marvel, Monica Rambeau, and the teenage superfan Ms. Marvel have to learn to fight as a unit before a vengeful Kree warrior tears the universe apart. The team-up works better than the plot holding it together.
Carol Danvers spends years as the most powerful being in the Marvel universe and the loneliest. A quantum accident entangles her with two other women who wield the same kind of energy. Now whenever one of them taps her power, the three switch positions across the galaxy. The film uses that gimmick as a metaphor for connection. Carol cannot save the universe alone anymore, and the script wants her to learn that family is the thing she ran from.
Brie Larson plays Carol with a weariness that finally gives the character interior life. She carries guilt over a planet she failed, and Larson lets that history weigh on her without speeches. Iman Vellani steals the film as Kamala Khan. She plays a teenager meeting her idol with such uncut joy that the energy reorganizes every scene she enters. Teyonah Parris grounds Monica Rambeau in adult grief over a mother she lost, and the contrast between her measured pain and Vellani’s exuberance is the best dynamic the movie has. Zawe Ashton plays the villain Dar-Benn with conviction that the writing never earns.
Nia DaCosta directs the body-swap mechanic with a precision that pays off. She choreographs fights where the three heroes teleport mid-punch, and the editing tracks who lands where without losing the audience. That sequence is the clearest staging of a superpower the franchise has managed in years. DaCosta and co-writers Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik build a script that cannot decide what it is. The film lurches from musical comedy to genocide to a sequence built around cats, and the tonal whiplash undercuts the stakes the plot keeps insisting on.
The Marvels works as a buddy movie and stumbles as a blockbuster. The three leads share a chemistry that makes the connective scenes sing. The plot around them is a thin revenge story with a villain who exists to give the heroes somewhere to point. DaCosta delivers the lightest, fastest entry the franchise has produced in a long stretch, and that economy is both its strength and a sign of how little it has to say.