Captain Marvel - Review

Captain Marvel

Academy Award winner Brie Larson (“The Room”) and Samuel L. Jackson star in the next evolution in what appears to be an endless array American comic books published by Marvel Comics and created by Stan Lee. This latest effort called “Captain Marvel” (a female superhero for a change) is an extraterrestrial Kree warrior who finds herself caught in the middle of an intergalactic battle between her people and the Skrulls. Living on Earth in 1995, she keeps having recurring memories of another life as U.S. Air Force pilot Carol Danvers. With help from Nick Fury, Captain Marvel tries to uncover the secrets of her past while harnessing her special superpowers to end the war with the evil Skrulls.

REVIEW: Captain Marvel stands out for one important reason and that is given I had no peripheral prior knowledge of the character and her super powers I was indeed impressed with how the directors made her back story and the evolution of her super power rather easy to understand from the onset.

I am not a fan of comic books and I was worried I would be lost in the minutiae and nuance of some insider details - knowledge that only the true die hard comic book fans would have. But I soon realized in the film that this screen adaptation plot was going to be very struggle free viewing thanks to the effort of fuel Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck who moved the film along with good pace, lots of clarity and overall made it a solid coherent entertainment experience for all of its 2:05 minute running time.

Brie Larson and Sam Jackson have loads of on screen chemistry as we get to see how they work effectively in saving the universe together. We also see them delve separably into subplots of how her human character Carol Danvers struggled to reconcile her having mysterious flash backs of a previous life and how Jackson’s Nick Fury younger more mischievous light hearted side evolved into the more stoic serious minded black eye patch leather trench coat wearing icon. Jackson was especially effective playing the younger Fury with a performance that was kind of a hybrid form of both his “Die Hard with a Vengeance” character Zeus Carver and his “Pulp Fiction” Jules Winnfield. He was a great source of well-timed stinging dagger like humor and equally genuine self-deprecating comic relief. Actually the whole film had surprisingly far more humor that your typical comic book character driven film as the plot moved rather adroitly along from action to serious dramatic moments to action to rather cleaver moments to action to rather down right super funny moments.

This Marvel Comic Book Hero effort really doesn't break any new ground per-se, as there are plenty of the standard running, aerial chases, jumping, fighting, body slamming, humans flying and flashes of brilliant lights blowing stuff up. But in the aggregate this film has enough of the “right stuff” as a smart genuinely compelling stand-alone film that assuredly will be offering up many more sequels to come.

Captain Marvel is fun and well worth seeing. To be sure, have ”No Doubt”………..You  can take this pink ribbon off her eyes as she’s “not just a girl”.

3.50 Stars