Captain Marvel (2019)
Somewhere between Aquaman and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, I stopped enjoying my self-imposed challenge of working through the billion-dollar box office club on Letterboxd and started genuinely dreading it. What I naively imagined would be a curated tour through modern cinema's crowning achievements has, in practice, become a relentless slog through what often feels like the exact same film with a different logo slapped on top. Captain Marvel is a prime offender, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
To be fair to it, the film is flashy. The CGI is polished to a mirror sheen, and the cosmic, neon-drenched set pieces are certainly loud and visually busy. But pretty colours only carry you so far when the foundations underneath are this wobbly. The script is a genuine mess, lurching between timelines in a way that feels less like clever, puzzle-box storytelling and more like a desperate attempt to paper over a glaring lack of narrative coherence. Clunky exposition gets shovelled at you in great heaps, and plot twists arrive not because they've been earned, but because something has to happen next. It's filmmaking by checklist.
Then there's the matter of the performances, which left me cold. Brie Larson clearly puts in the effort, projecting a stoic, superheroic resolve throughout, but the material she's been handed is so rigid and devoid of genuine human warmth that it frequently reads as wooden rather than steely. That's not entirely her fault. When your dialogue sounds like it was written by a committee trying to approximate wit, you're fighting a losing battle from the first scene.
What really stings is what happens to Samuel L. Jackson, who is, hilariously, my most-watched actor according to Letterboxd. Digitally de-aged to within an inch of his life and stuck delivering banter that never quite lands, he's a performer I have enormous time for, and watching him struggle against clunky material is genuinely dispiriting. I loved him in Snakes on a Plane, a film that had no business being as entertaining as it was, largely because it gave Jackson something to actually play with. Here, he's just a special effect with a good face.
The broader frustration, though, isn't really with any one actor or even this one film. It's with the tier of modern franchise cinema that Captain Marvel so perfectly represents. These films aren't made to surprise you or move you or stick with you on the drive home. They're made to check corporate boxes, deliver the requisite explosions on schedule, and hoover up a billion dollars before anyone notices the story doesn't quite hold together. On those commercial terms, this one was obviously a roaring success. On the terms I actually care about, it's hollow.
If you've sat through one of these glossy, assembly-line blockbusters and come away feeling vaguely entertained but entirely unmoved, you know exactly what Captain Marvel feels like. It doesn't break the mould. It isn't trying to. And that, more than any individual failing of script or performance, is what makes it so exhausting to write about. There's nothing here to push back against, nothing to argue with, nothing to love or even properly hate. It just exists, loudly, for two hours, and then it stops.
Two and a half stars, and I'm being generous because the cat is genuinely quite funny.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2026-07-16
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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