The Marvels

 

Despite tissue-thin plotting and a frustrating lack of narrative freshness, writer / director Nia DaCosta's The Marvels squeezes a surprising number of solid laughs into its earnest celebration of female fire in which most of the principals are women.

Brie Larson returns as star-powered Capt. Carol Danvers a/k/a Captain Marvel, and finds herself linked to two other women in (what else?) a battle to save the universe.

Her partners this round are Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), the brilliant cosmologist daughter of a lost companion who has been mentored by the ubiquitous Avengers wrangler Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and a teenaged New Jersey fangirl named Kamala (a wonderfully energetic Iman Vellani), who has inherited a powerful bracelet that can turn light into matter.

Hunting the bracelet is Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), the monomaniacal leader of a dying planet that Captain Marvel doomed in an over-zealous attempt to save its people from a tyrannical intelligence. Dar-Benn owns the bracelet's partner and when she has both she'll be able to restore life to her planet, and destroy everything and everyone held dear by Captain Marvel, whom she calls the Annihilator.

As usual, the picture's sci-fi mumbo-jumbo will turn on diehards but others might find real entertainment in the cockeyed lunacy at work when the serious matters of galactic upheaval are not on the screen. For example, a sequence set in a watery world where the inhabitants' native language is song is so outrageously ridiculous that I thought for a minute I was watching a Monty Python bit.

Of the more than 30 pictures produced by Marvel Studios, The Marvels will not be counted among its best. But for what it is -- a full-throated declaration that "the ladies got this" -- it's a welcome addition to the seemingly endlessly expanding universe.