An embarrassing, cheesy, cliché ridden mess

Rating: 3/10 (17 March 2019)

Well what do you know, even though I've been on IMDB for 17 years and posted the first of 90 reviews back in 2002, it seems that IMDB declined to post my first review of Captain Marvel.
How strange, I wonder if it was because I mentioned that the lead actor had made a job of using identity politics to promote this movie and hence I had to address it to indemnify myself from accusations of being a sexist? Let's see if they deem this review worthy or pull it because their masters don't want to see negative reviews of such a 'right on' film.
There is nothing subtle or good natured in Captain Marvel. The messaging is in your face and slapped on with a heavy wet mop. The script is a mess where you could see that the multiple writers were struggling to write anything funny but just couldn't. The agenda was constantly there with laughable attempts to put down guys, with them either offering douche lines like 'it's called a cockpit', demoralising 'you can't do it' advice from Carol's father (because of course all fathers want to limit their daughters ambition!) or flat out sexism like when Fury is scanned and the response is 'Human male - no threat at all'. It was laugh out loud for its blatant motive.
The action scenes were a lot of noise and insanely quick cuts, primarily to mask that Brie can't actually do many, if any, of the stunts. She even struggles to run with any form of class or elan. Take a look at Civil War and Infinity War and you can clearly see the action. You know what is going on, you can grasp the geography of the scene and you can see the actor in frame pulling off most of the action. That is why people make a big deal about Tom Cruise doing a lot of his action scenes. The more you can see your star in the scene, the more you connect with a scene.
Not so with Brie, although saying this, it is very hard to actually connect to Brie, when her facial moves are so limited and her character is so weakly written. I mean consider Star Lord, who has a similar 'taken from Earth' story. How rich of a character is he compared to Carol?
But of course, this is the difference. Starlord is just a man and nothing special and hence his character has to be well written to get you to like and connect with him. With the agenda being driven so hard in this film, you HAVE TO like Carol's character, simply because she is a woman and hence no elements of originality or engagement need to be added to her character. Like her or be branded a sexist.
So the lead portrayal is bland and boring and the script, written by a minimum of six credited writers, is confusing, lacking in direction and crammed full of tiresome social justice commentary. The action scenes are a mess and the perceived bad guy has a bewildering choice of accent that sounds shockingly bad. There is no real mention of Carol's parents or family because I guess they are irrelevant. Instead we concentrate on her girl power friendship, which again makes no mention of the daughter's father, but instead has a cookie cutter child that seemingly used to wear Carol's old flying jacket even though it would have completely dwarfed her.
By the final action scenes Carol is revealed to be so powerful that there is literally no tension in her poorly constructed fight scenes. Why is she engaging in hand to hand combat when she can shoot blasts from her fists? Her powers are so all-consuming and so encompassing that they can either be used to fly through a spaceship, kick-start a smashed and downed craft (how does an energy blast do that) or mean that she doesn't even have to worry about the triviality of breathing in space. She has become such an all-powerful being that Ronan, upon seeing the ease with which she destroys his weapons, identifies her as a woman (surely he would have just called her a human rather than being able to identify her gender from afar) rather than a weapon.
And as for the cat, good lord, how utterly ridiculous. As if it's not bad enough that it renders hard-nosed Nick Fury into a weak arsed 'coochie coochie' fool, it also conveniently turns into a space Octopus monster that swallows the Tesseract and tears out his eyeball for no apparent reason. The utter stupidity of the film manifesting itself in a scene where Nick has permanently lost the vision in one eye but is still happy to continue washing the dishes while having a banal heart to heart with Danvers.
If you need more evidence of just how lame this is compared to other Marvel films, just compare the differences in acting and drama in the mid credits scene where Mar-vel makes an appearance. There is more going on in that one scene than this entire film.
This film really is poor. Thor: The Dark World was tedious, GOTG 2 just too much CGI and a third act that dragged on for too long and Ultron collapsed under its own weight and expectations (I mention this to help give the reader a flavour of what I do and don't like in the MCU). But this, this is a grade A stinker. Writers that can't write, directors that can't direct and actors that can't act. An unholy triumvirate that delivers the worst Marvel film, yet one that was deliberately shoehorned in front of Endgame to cash in on the cliff hanger of Infinity War.
Now this could all be a simple wrong move from Marvel but I fear this could be the start of a rocky descent into SJW pleasing but real fan frustrating movies. Fingers crossed that I am wrong.
I must add one final comment to counter that it is such a 'popular' film. I went and saw this on Thursday 14th March at a large local multiplex cinema. I saw a 10.00pm performance, literally one week after the film came out and there were 12 people in the auditorium. Now I'd seen some pics of empty theatres but thought that maybe they were taken 30 minutes before curtain up but this was amazing. A week after it had come out, with the media reporting it was a blockbuster smash doing great business and there were no more than 12 people in a 10:00pm performance. It's almost like there is some kind of co-ordinated campaign to misinform, like I don't know, pulling reviews that don't sing the company line...