Captain Marvel Review

The good version of this film is somewhere inside it. There is a real idea here about a soldier discovering that her own side lied to her, and the Skrull reversal, refugees recast from monsters into victims, is the sharpest political turn the studio has attempted. Ben Mendelsohn is excellent, playing an alien commander as a tired father with a job to finish. The de-aging on Samuel L. Jackson is seamless and his double act with Larson supplies the film's only relaxed passages.

But the writing works against its own lead constantly. Carol Danvers spends most of the runtime being told who she is by other people, and her memories arrive as fragments rather than scenes, so the emotional payoff rests on a friendship the film shows us only in postcards. Once the cap comes off her power she is invulnerable, which drains the last act of tension entirely, and the nineties setting is signposted with a soundtrack instead of a texture. Larson is better than this material and would prove it elsewhere. Perfectly competent and strangely inert.