‘The Marvels’ Review: Brie Larson Leads a Trio of Light-Force Heroines in a Skittery Sequel Loaded Down With MCU Baggage

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “The Marvels,” Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a snarky but beaming-eyed Pakistani-American teenage mutant ninja fangirl, is seated in her bedroom in Jersey City, sketching comic-book panels in which she imagines herself part of a team with her idol, Carol Danvers, a.k.a.

Captain Marvel (Brie Larson). She will soon get her wish. Suddenly, Kamala is zapped into a spaceship, where she takes the place of Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), a superhero astronaut who’s in the middle of an energized if rather nondescript kick-ass fight. (There are a lot of those in “The Marvels.”) As for Carol, she soon finds herself in the Khan family living room, fighting off a blue-skinned Kree soldier.

And then, just like that, Carol becomes Monica. All three of the characters have been teleported — not, in itself, an unusual thing to see in a comic-book movie.

In this case, however, their identities appear to be linked, as each one “becomes” the other. If you’re seeking an explanation for how this happened, you’ll get one: The three “came into direct contact with some malfunctioning jump points.” (There are a lot of explanations like that in “The Marvels”; you may feel like you’re flashing back to the excitement of eleventh-grade chemistry class.) But as the characters discover that “our light powers are entangled, so we change places whenever we use them at the same time,” all the space-shifting and identity-hopping has the unintentional effect of making the three seem a little too interchangeable. “Captain Marvel,” released four years ago, was not a comic-book adventure beloved by critics, but I dug it a lot, because the film’s action seemed lit from within, and the Brie Larson heroine was caught in a.