There was a recent South Park episode that lampooned the last decade of Disney’s output as a hackneyed string of remakes and derivatives comprising the Panderverse. Its films recycle the same stream of plots, interchanging the roles and characters to appeal and pander to different audiences. The media conglomerate’s latest addendum to the behemoth Marvel franchise, The Marvels, is as affirming a testament to this as anything Disney has put out in recent years.
Effectively an all-female Avengers remake, The Marvels centers on Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), better known as Ms. Marvel, first introduced through one of Marvel's myriad offshoot series. A teenager from New Jersey, Khan spends her days daydreaming and doodling fantasies of fighting galactic crime alongside Captain Marvel (Brie Larson), whose posters festoon Khan’s bedroom walls.
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In lieu of an interesting or original plot, the film instead centers on a gimmick: a time continuum disruption causing Kamala Khan, Captain Marvel, and Monica Rambeau, a female superhero from another Marvel Cinematic Universe project, to swap places when using their superpowers. It's during this chaos that Khan first encounters her idol, Captain Marvel.
Among the few redeeming qualities of The Marvels is Khan and her fervent fawning over Captain Marvel. She radiates an endearing enthusiasm at the thought of working alongside her favorite hero that feels genuine and heartfelt. She’s the only one who seems even mildly eager to be in the film. This is in stark contrast to Larson, whose deadpan countenance and delivery suggest she needed the paycheck for a new vacation home.
The plot itself involves a cliche template villain, Dar-Benn, who ascended to power after a civil war tore her planet apart. On a mission to siphon vital resources (air, water, sun) from other planets, Dar-Benn begins targeting planets closest to Captain Marvel, whom she blames for spawning the war.
Everything that follows feels like a hodgepodge of disconnected gags the writers individually came up with and later concatenated in formulaic Marvel fashion. One of the planets the Marvels visit while trying to thwart Dar-Benn features a native population that exclusively communicates through song, resulting in an awkward and out-of-place musical number with Captain Marvel that should never have made it past the editing stage.
Khan’s traditionalist conservative Pakistani family is also roped into the film as a source of comic relief; it is unclear what alleged serious tension the writers thought they were relieving. Although their scenes are among the funniest and freshest in the MCU — the highlight being Kamala’s father, sporting his thick accent, selling one of Nick Fury’s spaceship pilots on investing in index funds — they have no reason to be there, in outer space, other than for setting up such scenes.
As in all Marvel films, the spate of side quests builds and culminates in a grand but forgettable CGI-fest finale in which the heroes and the villain duke it out in front of a green screen. And as always, the heroes’ powers are arbitrarily diminished and exaggerated. In one scene, Captain Marvel effortlessly blazes through concrete and steel and shoots an energy beam through a small army, and in another, she barely bests a pair of henchmen in a suburban home.
Iman Vellani's captivating portrayal of Khan hints at a promising future for her character in a film that might be worth the watch. Unfortunately, The Marvels falls short of doing her justice, remaining ensnared in the familiar web of Disney's bland Panderverse.
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Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog and a computer engineer in Toronto pursuing his MBA.