Captain Miss-Fire

Rating: 4/10 (12 March 2019)

Well, it had to happen at one point, didn't it.
Captain Marvel is not a bad movie, just a terribly mediocre one.
The problems that lead to this are many, but I find that at the heart of it is the fact that it tries to juggle several things at the same time without ever really managing to do any of them well.
Juggling an origin story with a fish out of water story; a body cop narrative along with the overall plot of the war between the Kree and the Skrull, while at the same time trying to tie it into the main Avengers plotline (and the MC universe), is all a bit much. When we then add a plotline where Carol Danvers tries to reconstruct the memories of her lost past, nothing is ever really given enough time to have any meaningful impact.
To make matters even worse, the character of Capt. Marvel suffers greatly from this. After spending almost two hours with Carol Danvers, I still have no idea who she actually is, and when the movie reached its climax, all I was left with was a superhero flying around shooting lasers from her hands, while looking like an overenthusiastically decorated Christmas tree. I never felt close to the character because the movie simply failed to get me emotionally engaged. This could have been rectified if they had focused more on her reconstructing her past, thereby giving us a chance to connect with her, making a sequence of her getting knocked down and standing up again meaningful. When you have such an overpowered character as Capt. Marvel, you have to compensate for her lack of physical endangerment with some kind of personal stakes, and Capt. Marvel has none of that. The lack of characterization is quite surprising when you consider that Marvel up until this point have been quite good at giving us interesting characters.
Besides from that, there are some outright cringe worthy "Solo" moments, where we are told the backstory of things that never needed explanations in the first place. Remember how the Solo movie, for some reason, thought it prudent to tell us how Han got his surname and his blaster? Yes, we get that in Capt. Marvel, and it is just as bad and equally pointless!
Now, there are some good moments in this movie, but they are sadly not many, and when you add bad characterization too that, we are left with a movie that has the same satisfaction as a McDonald's cheeseburger. It does not taste all that good, and when you burp you are hungry again.
Sorry, but if you want to see a female superhero then watch Wonder Woman instead.
Yes, DC actually have Marvel beat in this category.