Movie Review

Great female camaraderie is not enough to make The Marvels a success

When Avengers: Endgame bowed to great reviews and even greater box office numbers in 2019, absolutely no one would have said at the time that Marvel Studios was in trouble. But thanks to the pandemic in 2020 and a lack of a unifying force that was the Avengers, only a few of the subsequent nine films have felt on par with the best Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, and most have been outright bad.

The Marvels might be the least anticipated MCU movie yet, both because recent history has taught fans to lower their expectations, and because it’s a mish-mash of characters from multiple Marvel properties who have not previously interacted. Captain Marvel/Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) remains the big name, having had her own 2019 movie and a big part in Endgame.

She’s joined by Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), last seen taking on Scarlet Witch in WandaVision, and Kamala Khan/Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani), who starred in her own Disney+ series. Through a series of events too convoluted to explain properly, the three superheroes wind up with their powers entangled, instantly switching them out for each other when one of them attempts to use a certain power.

The big bad is Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), who … well, it doesn’t really matter that much. Suffice it to say that she has a long-standing beef with Captain Marvel, finds a power that levels the playing field between her and the Marvels, and sets out to become even more powerful and exact revenge.

Written and directed by Nia DaCosta, and co-written by Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik, the film can be judged on two elements. The first and most successful is the camaraderie between the three main characters/actors. No matter what inane thing they’re required to do, the trio has a chemistry together that makes them enjoyable to watch, with Kamala’s unceasing positivity one of the film’s high points.

The story, though, leaves much to be desired. The body-switching, or whatever you want to call it, gets confusing the more frenetic a scene becomes. With that and other elements, it often feels like the filmmakers are just making up the rules as they go and hoping no one will notice the holes. The conflict between the Marvels and Dar-Benn is so similar to other Marvel movies that it feels like they just copied and pasted previous scripts.

And even though the same problem has existed for a while in MCU movies, making the movie with 99 percent CGI has an extreme distancing effect. There is just no way to get invested in what the heroes are trying to do when everything around them is fake. And since their powers amount to little more than glowing hands, none of the effects are exciting, either.

The frustrating thing is that Larson, Parris, and Villani actually do make for a solid team. If you ignore the superhero stuff, each of them has some standout moments and, if the movie had allowed it more, emotional connections. Ashton makes for a decent villain, but the film doesn’t give her much to work with, and in the end her character feels generic.

It’s difficult to know where the MCU goes from here, as the actors strike and a major actor in serious legal trouble has thrown another wrench in their overall plans. The Marvels is neither bad enough to spell doom for the whole enterprise nor good enough to be considered a savior. But so-so just won’t cut it in this day and age of blockbuster movies.

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The Marvels opens in theaters on November 10.

Photo by Laura Radford / courtesy of Marvel Studios

Iman Vellani, Brie Larson, and Teyonnah Parris in The Marvels

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Movie Review

Comedy all-stars Jack Black and Paul Rudd can't save Anaconda sequel

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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