Captain Marvel review: DISAPPOINTING – It's NOT that great, even that end credit scene

Captain Marvel has been the focus of huge fan, critic AND troll attention. It has to set up the new tone and scope for Marvel Phase Four after Avengers Endgame. It is also a shining beacon of hope for greater representation of women in Hollywood and especially in blockbusters. A female superhero will head up the biggest blockbuster franchise in Hollywood after the inevitable Endgame losses. Some quarters will automatically hail it as a triumph in the same way Black Panther was somewhat over-praised. Others have already decided it is yet another anti-male piece of Hollywood propaganda. It is neither. Most disappointingly of all, it is simply rather average. For a film famously tagged “Higher, further, faster” it fails to do all three.

The origin story of probably Marvel’s most powerful hero comes laden with talented stars and a twenty-movie pedigree.

Larson brings intense conviction to a strangely restrained performance. She clearly has the charisma and the range, but neither is fully unleashed. Her dry humour and quips have echoes of Tony Stark and there are moments of banter with Samuel L Jackson’s (very impressively rendered) young Nick Fury, but it feels formulaic and a little forced.

She is powerful in the action sequences and the closing act finally brings some thrilling set-pieces and a really classic twist. However, the biggest problem was that when the stakes were raised, the consequences high and the personal blows heavy – I simply didn’t care.

Yes, everyone is right, the cat is a total scene-stealer but that really shouldn’t be the best thing about a movie. 

Marvel has such a great history is using left-field, lesser-known directors but Anna Fleck and Ryan Boden display neither mastery of the blockbuster form nor indie flair. The movie is overlong but uneven. Frantic moments of intense action or info-dumping punctuate long plodding sections possibly meant to explore character development. Yet I came out feeling like I didn’t know anyone at all. Banter alone does not a personality make.

The 1990s setting is fun, the visual gags and classy music choices are excellent, but it began to feel like a lot of smart box-ticking. Some indefinable essential ingredient  – something Marvel usually excels at – is somehow missing. It felt like an MCU Phase 1 movie or that last Star Trek Beyond film that was supposed to get back to its roots but just felt a bit like the back end of the aforementioned.

I felt detached for too much of the film despite such fine actors and a galaxy-spanning plot. Marvel always does such a powerful job of combining humour with heart so that consequences, when they come, are complex and hit that bit harder.

This is one of the only MCU movies that, for me, failed to do so. I never really understood the scale, stakes or actual point of the Kree-Skrull war so the big revelation was diminished. Similarly, when Carol Danvers finally figures out what really happened to her it should have brought her and the audiences to our knees. I might have shrugged.

Ben Mendelsohn is entertaining as Skrull villain Talos, Jude Law is commanding and impressive as Kree warrior Yon-Rogg and Annette Benning is pleasingly quixotic as the tricksy Kree Supreme Intelligence.

There is always pure pleasure in seeing Clark Greg as Phil Coulson and Maria Rambeau is engaging, warm and the audience’s way into the movie as Carol’s former best friend Maria Rambeau. But strong performers like Lee Pace, Gemma Chan and Djimon Hounsou are frittered away in underdeveloped roles and Ronan, Minerva and Korath. There are also two more blue chaps in Carol’s Kree crew, but I can’t even remember their names.

There was so much I wanted to know more about, characters I was keen to explore, but over two hours actually told us very little, except the amusing truth of how Nick Fury lost his eye. Even the mid-credit Avengers Endgame scene is barely worth waiting for.

I wanted to love this film, not for the social issues, not even as the start of the vision for Phase 4, but because it had the potential to be something new and fresh. Instead, it felt old-fashioned, superficial and regressive. 

For the first time ever, I’m a little nervous about what comes after Endgame. 

CAPTAIN MARVEL IS OUT THIS FRIDAY