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

Survival takes on new meaning in intense but hokey Whalefall

Photo courtesy of 20th Century Studios

Austin Abrams in Whalefall.

Austin Abrams has been a professional actor for 15 years, but the 30-year-old seems to just now be getting his due. After years of mostly supporting roles in films like Paper Towns, Brad’s Status, and Weapons, he has been charged with leading two films in 2026 where he’s largely acting by himself: First Resident Evil and now Whalefall.

Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, who has returned home to California a year after the death of his hard-ass father, Mitt (Josh Brolin). The two had a tempestuous relationship, and while his mom (Elisabeth Shue) and sisters (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd) reminisce fondly about him, Jay finds it difficult to come up with good memories. The two did share a connection with the ocean, and Jay decides to honor him by going scuba diving.

Ignoring warnings of whale activity in the area, Jay makes his way out into a notoriously dangerous part of the ocean near their home. Soon after he starts swimming, he encounters a sperm whale chasing after a giant squid. Jay inadvertently gets sucked into the enormous creature’s mouth and, ultimately, inside its body. Faced with a seemingly inescapable situation, Jay’s only hope lies in the lessons his father taught him.

Directed by Brian Duffield and adapted by Duffield and Daniel Kraus from Kraus’ book of the same name, the film is at its best when it depicts Jay struggling to survive within the whale. The claustrophobic nature of the setting and the various obstacles (multiple contracting chambers, the squid, and more) he faces make every scene inside the whale feel as intense and cover-your-eyes scary as any great horror movie.

Naturally, the entire movie can’t be about his survival efforts, and so the filmmakers toggle back and forth between Jay’s ordeal in the whale to memories of times with his father. Not so coincidentally, these remembrances come with subtle or overt wisdom from Mitt that would serve Jay well in his current situation. More often than not, these flashback scenes are so on-the-nose that they come off as cheesy instead of inspirational.

It’s also difficult to derive any big emotions from the story other than revulsion at the way Jay’s body is brutalized while he’s inside the whale. None of the characters in the film receive a notable introduction to the audience before big events start happening. It’s next-to-impossible to be invested in their stories when their personalities are being revealed in bits and pieces throughout the movie.

Abrams does well enough in bringing out the terror Jay feels in the whale and the sullenness/anger he has toward his father in other scenes. But whether it’s because his lines in the whale are hard to understand (he’s often talking around a scuba mouthpiece) or the disconnect the character has with father, there’s just something missing in his performance. Brolin’s performance is one-note, and Shue, Levy, Rudd, and John Ortiz don’t appear enough to make a big impact.

With Kraus onboard as the co-writer of the film, it may be the case that Duffield was not given leeway to change the story of Whalefall too much. What might have worked in the book doesn’t seem to translate equally to the film, and while Jay’s nightmare in the whale is effective, the rest of his story doesn’t come across as successfully.

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Whalefall is now playing in theaters.

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