Boring, badly directed and poorly written

Rating: 1/10 (17 March 2019)

There isn't much positive to say about Captain Marvel.
As much as I wanted to like this film, I just couldn't. Brie Larson's performance is underwhelming, and she doesn't give the feeling of a strong female lead, especially for a character as powerful and important as Captain Marvel. Her performance is utterly forgettable and I developed no sense of pathos with her character.
The fight scenes lack excitement, and in fact the whole film from beginning to end lacks the pace and energy of other Marvel films such as Thor: Ragnarok or Doctor Strange.
The effects are flashy and colourful, but that isn't enough to keep me engaged.
Samuel L. Jackson puts in a solid performance as Fury, but I can't help but feel he is drowning in mediocrity in this movie.
The film on multiple occasions tries to 'make a point' with feminist pandering - the scene at the end where captain Marvel blasts and then drags Jude Law is just pointless and is clearly only there to show that Captain Marvel has 'girl power' - the fight was already over.
There is also a moment which made me just think 'really?' - when the young girl tells her Mum to go on an incredibly dangerous and life threatening mission - I get the point the film is trying to make - women can fight evil just like men - and this is true, but I doubt someone's 10 year old daughter would realistically tell them to go and face a very real risk of death, facing the prospect of being orphaned (she also appears to be a single mum, so she would have ended up in a care home should anything go wrong).
Overall, the film is lazily written, poorly directed, and suffers from the current Hollywood trend of making a movie to 'tick boxes' rather than actually making a decent piece of art. You can make a film with a strong female lead in an action movie and not make a massive deal out of the fact that she is a woman - The Hunger Games and the Resident Evil films are good examples of this.