Captain Marvel flies but doesn't soar

When it comes to paying dues there are few superheroes who have done more than Captain Marvel. In various incarnations the character has been male, dead, female, objectified, raped, abused, and generally treated as an irrelevance. So, no one could grudge Marvel her two hours in the spotlight in this movie. It’s pronounced ‘Mar-VELL’ by the way, suggesting the Kree were big fans of Elizabethan poetry.

Although until recently she has never been more than a second string character Marvel, like Doctor Strange and, to a certain extent, Ant-Man, seems destined to play a significant role in a number of forthcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe stories. The end of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) was a big clue in that direction.

In those circumstance it makes sense that this movie acts as something of a placeholder filling in some gaps in various backstories before this phase of the MCU saga comes to an end in a couple of months. And on that basis, the film is no better than it ought to be. It works well as a broadly entertaining adventure with a couple of engaging performances from Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson at its heart.

Larson is the titular heroine, a young woman with a mysterious past who becomes a key combatant in an intergalactic war between two alien nations - the Kree and the Skrulls - with Earth as a proxy battlefield. Jackson finally gives us his first substantive outing as Nick Fury since Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014). Since this story takes place in 1995 there is a lot of digital de-ageing going on with Fury, but Jackson does a good job in performing through the pixels.

The back and forth between him and Larson is one of the highlights of the film which at times struggles to decide whether it as an intergalactic saga a bickering romcom or an emo drama. The transition between these two themes from co-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck is a little less sure-footed than it might have been. Their lo-fi indie efforts such as the excellent Half Nelson (2006) don’t seem like the ideal fit for this film.

There are moments, especially in the action set-pieces, where you get a sense that they have put rather too much trust in the second unit and there is a slight disconnect between the action scenes and the character moments. I did however like the 1995 style visual palette for the 1995 car chase; a nice touch.

Even so, the film feels clunky and a little leaden in places and could probably have done with a little more zip in the cut to improve the rhythm.

One of the big issues for me with the action sequences is the lack of jeopardy. It’s established early on that Mar-vell is one of the most powerful beings in the universe so there’s not a lot of harm that can come to her. This tends to reduce the fight scenes to the level of video games and makes for a less passive experience than we have become used to.

Overall Captain Marvel lacks that sense of thrilling excitement that comes from the best of the MCU offerings. It has to act as a piece of exposition linking ten years of a franchise so it is inevitable the sailing is not quite as smooth as it might be.

The performances are good though and there are nice turns from Jude Law and Ben Mendelsohn in supporting roles. And those gaps that need to be filled in have been filled in and MCU completists can now construct a pretty credible time line from 1941 to 2019 if they really want to.

Inevitably you would expect to see Captain Marvel back in a sequel and this is indicated in the finale of the movie. However if you stick around for the mid-credits sequence – and who doesn’t these days? – it becomes apparent you’ll be seeing her a lot sooner than that.