There’s a blue, furry, unmistakable man sitting in the post-credits scene of this film, and he has just made the X-Men real inside the MCU. That’s the headline, and it’s a strange one for a film that’s otherwise fairly ordinary. A two and a half, maybe a three.
Kamala is the reason to watch it
Iman Vellani is the best thing here by a distance, and as a fellow Canadian I’ll admit to being extremely pleased about it.
What she does is harder than it looks. She’s playing the only person in the film who is thrilled to be there, a fan who has ended up inside the story, and she has to carry that without becoming annoying. She manages it in her first feature, which is remarkable, and the fact that she got the part essentially by being a genuine fan rather than an established actress makes it better rather than worse. Exceptional, honestly.
Her family are the other success. They’re cool, they’re relatable, and the way they look after everyone who comes into their orbit, including two superheroes who have wandered into the flat, is the warmest material in the film. When the story stops for them it improves.
The swapping is a genuinely good idea
The body-switching mechanic works and it’s the one structurally inventive thing in the picture.
Every time the three of them use their powers simultaneously they swap places, which turns fights into a co-ordination problem rather than a strength contest. It’s funny, it’s enjoyable to watch, and the sequence where they have to learn to fight around it is the best action in the film.
Good idea, well executed, and it isn’t enough to carry ninety minutes on its own.
Carol still underwhelms me, and it’s a power problem
Here’s my long-standing issue, and this film hasn’t fixed it.
Carol’s abilities come from an Infinity Stone. That should place her at a level nothing else on screen approaches, and she has never once been portrayed that way.
Run the comparison. Thanos took the Hulk apart with his bare hands and no stones at all, and adding the power stone to that just made an already overwhelming being more so. So why is Carol, whose entire origin is stone-derived, consistently written as somebody who can be knocked through a wall and inconvenienced? I’d be genuinely astounded if she turned out to be as powerful as the premise implies, because she never has been.
She needs to show a great deal more. That’s been the gap since I first wrote about her, and four years later it’s still the gap.
Monica doesn’t land for me
I’m not a huge fan of the character, and I wasn’t engaged by her here.
She’s less interesting than the two people she’s sharing the film with, which is a difficult position to be in. Teyonah Parris is fine, and the writing gives her a slightly sullen competence and not much else. Whenever the film cuts to her I found myself waiting for it to cut back.
The story is a bit boring
That’s the honest problem underneath everything else.
I like that the film is following through on the consequences of Carol’s earlier decisions, what that did to the Kree, and the mess she left behind. That’s a real idea and it deserves attention. I just wasn’t very interested in the execution.
Dar-Benn is a poor villain. Nothing exciting about her, no argument worth engaging with, and she exists to move a plot from one planet to another. After a year of Marvel antagonists who mostly haven’t worked, this one is near the bottom.
The film also moves very quickly and is very short, which I’d normally welcome, and here it means nothing has room to develop.
And then the credits roll
Which brings us back to the blue man.
I loved that scene. It made me sit up in a way nothing in the preceding film managed. Kelsey Grammer, in the makeup, in a version of the world where the X-Men exist, casually treating it as unremarkable.
The X-Men were far and away one of my favourite teams for the longest time when I was collecting, and seeing that door open inside this universe is genuinely exciting. I’ve no idea how they intend to tie it together. Monica ends up somewhere she shouldn’t be able to reach, and the film declines to explain any of it.
I want to know. I’m just aware that this is a very large promise to attach to a film that, by all accounts, almost nobody has gone to see. The box office numbers this weekend have been rough, and putting something this significant in the credits of a film with that reach is a curious decision.
Where it lands
Two and a half, possibly three. Kamala is great, her family is great, the swapping gimmick is clever, and the film around all of it is thin.
It’s a better time than some of this year’s other efforts and it isn’t going to change anyone’s mind about where the franchise is. What it might have done, in its final thirty seconds, is set up something considerably more interesting than itself.
