Movie Reviews: MCU Catch-up

Marvel Cinematic Underperformers

I finally made myself catch up on some of the Marvel movies that did not perform well at the box office, were critical bombs, were audience bombs, or some combination of the three. Here goes!

The Marvels (2023) co-written and directed by Nia DaCosta

Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), is a Captain Marvel, aka Carol Danvers (Brie Larson), fangirl. Kamala is also the hero of Jersey City, using her special light-solidifying powers to fight bad guys. What she really wants is to team up with her idol. Meanwhile, Monica Rambeau (Teyona Parris) works with Nick Fury (Samuel Jackson) on an orbital platform that is monitoring intergalactic travel and protecting the Earth. Captain Marvel is investigating a wormhole. All three heroes' powers are used at the same time and become quantum entangled, resulting in them swapping places with each other. Captain Marvel starts by fighting some Kree then she keeps flipping with Monica at the space station and Kamala at her home in New Jersey. The plot spins out from there as a representative from the Kree home world seeks to save their planet by stealing resources from other planets, especially planets that Captain Marvel holds dear, since she was the one to damage the Kree home world in the first place. 

The plot of the movie is a little convoluted as each main character works on some of her own flaws. The trio visits a variety of planets, some of which strain at the edge of plausibility considering they are in the same universe. The movie has a fun and light-hearted tone with Kamala, who has that innocent wonder and excitement as a young superhero. Danvers is mostly serious and dark-hearted, dealing with what she has done (the Kree call her "The Annihilator" which she does not like at all, though probably deserves). Bridging the gap between the characters is tricky and more or less fails. The tonal shifts are huge swings that don't hang together, much like the planet where everyone sings and dances doesn't jive with the near-dead Kree home world. 

I can see why the film did not perform well, though it is not as bad as I thought it would be. That being said, it is still a hot mess with unequal amounts of good and bad parts.

Barely recommended--Only for Marvel completists or Kamala Khan fans.

Madame Web (2024) directed by S. J. Clarkson

In 1973, Constance Webb (Kerry Bishe) is in Peruvian Amazonia searching for a legendary spider. She hopes it will cure all sorts of illnesses and ignores all the legends about a race of spider-enhanced locals who can jump through the trees and have super-strength. She treks through the jungle with some local helpers and Ezekiel (Tahar Rahim). She finally makes the find and Ezekiel turns traitor, shooting her even though she is 8 months pregnant. He takes the spider for himself, presumably to profit from it back in the United States. After Ezekiel leaves, the spider-natives show up and keep Constance alive long enough to deliver the baby. 

The story then jumps ahead thirty years to the life of Constance's daughter, Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), a paramedic who is sarcastic and lacks interpersonal skills. Her ambulance partner is Ben Parker (Adam Scott), who does a bit of wisecracking to help balance out their team and bring some levity to the movie. They go to a bridge accident where they have to cut a guy out of his car. Ben drags the guy from the car but it falls with Cassie inside. She has a near-death experience that unlocks a power that lets her see future events. She sees another accident scene where a co-worker dies and tries to stop it from happening. That doesn't work and she's given a week of leave to deal with her new visions of the future (assumed to be some mental health problem). Ben recommends she come to the funeral, which puts her in the path of three young girls who have been targeted by Ezekiel because he has had nightmares of them killing him every night. 

The story has a lot of promise, bringing a new character in whose only superpower is seeing the future. She can't crawl up walls or use super-strength, just a knowledge of future events that she could change. The first examples of her visions are confusing and disorienting for Cassie (and for viewers). They never get more coherent or easier to follow. Johnson's performance lacks luster and the writing isn't that great either, leaving Cassie as a less likable character than she should be. Viewers see the three teenage girls in the bad guy's dreams as cool spider-style fighters but they never get to be those characters other than in the dreams. As an origin story for them, this movie is disappointing. The young girls don't seem that heroic either even though they grow into it more by the end. So they are unsatisfying too.

The villain was the most interesting character. He has the strength and wall-crawling of Spider-man but obviously does not have the heroic self-sacrifice. He's obsessed avoiding the three girls killing her, so much so that he kills and blackmails others to get what he needs. The movie hints that he might be the cause of his own problems when it is implied that they girls get their power from contact with him. But maybe that was an unintentional hint since that very interesting possibility goes nowhere (though that was what I was most interested in).

Not recommended--this wasn't a total turkey but there are so many other average-to-better superhero films that this winds up close to the bottom of the stack. Maybe they were hoping for sequels with a team led by Cassie, but that did not pan out. 

Kraven the Hunter (2024) directed by J. C. Chandor

Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Sergei Kravinoff, the titular Kraven the Hunter. His father Nikolai (Russell Crowe) is a Russian crime boss who is raising his sons (there's also Dimitri (Fred Hechinger)) to be part of the business. Dimitri is not very manly, even as a young boy, whereas his older brother Sergei shows signs of what their father thinks is greatness. After their mother dies, Nikolai takes them on an African hunt. Sergei is attacked by a legendary lion, who carries him off. The nearly dead Sergei is discovered by Calypso, granddaughter of a local woman, who gives him a special magical drink from her grandma to restore his strength (and a Tarot card, which enables them to reconnect years later). Sergei is evacuated by helicopter, dies in a hospital, but then comes back to life with a strange glow in his eyes. Brought back home, he decides to leave, so Dimitri bears the burden of their father's ambition. As adults, Sergei is a secret assassin known as "The Hunter" who has a long list of targets and a blood-soaked method of killing them. He comes back to London for his brother's birthday and gets pulled into a mafia war between Nikolai and The Rhino (Alessandro Nivola), an ambitious crime lord who wants to take over as much business as he can.

The movie has a lot of exciting action sequences. Taylor-Johnson does a good job in the lead, portraying a sympathetic yet morally-compromised character. He lives for the hunt and for his own very narrow sense of justice. He's much better at being an antihero than Venom in his films. Calypso is little more than a plot device to move Kraven's agenda forward, which was a little disappointing. The Rhino character is more interesting as a mafia don than at the end when he turns into the comic book version of the character, which was unconvincing even if it did provide a big fight scene at the end. The ending after that fight dragged out a lot longer than it needed to. While this isn't a bad movie, it is definitely a B-movie in the superhero genre which is already chock full of better stuff. It failed at the box office due to viewer burnout with the genre and the obscurity of the character.

Barely recommended--this is more for completists or R-rated action fans.