Director: Nia DaCosta

Stars: Brie Larson, Teyonah Parris, Iman Vellani, Zawe Ashton, Samuel L. Jackson

The second solo-ish outing for Brie Larson’s powerful superheroine busts a gut to be breezy, light and propulsive, but is undone by scrappy execution.

The frantic introduction has New Jersey teen Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel (Vellani) being zapped from her bedroom into space and switching places with superhero astronaut Monica Rambeau (Parris). Then Carol Danvers aka Captain Marvel (Larson) finds herself in Kamala’s bedroom and must clumsily make her excuses to Kamala’s dumbfounded parents and leave. The first of several exposition dumps explains that their identities have been linked and their ‘light powers’ entangled thanks to faulty ‘jump points’ in space.

To fix the problem, the trio must pool their powers to combat Dar-Benn (Ashton), a vengeful member of the Kree race who Captain Marvel defeated in the first picture. Dar-Benn is desperate to acquire Kamala’s wrist bangle which it emerges is one of two quantum bangles, the other which Dar-Benn already possesses.

The picture lurches from setpiece to setpiece without much sense of grace and rhythm, taking in an irksome excursion to a singing planet, and some admittedly amusing high jinx with the rapaciously hungry cat-alien flerkins.

There are some nice character moments: teen Kamala brings some vitality to the proceedings, even if her geeking out over meeting her socially awkward hero Captain Marvel grows a little tiresome, and there are funny exchanges between Samuel L. Jackson’s no-nonsense Nick Fury and Kamala’s fussy parents. Zawe Ashton’s fretful nutter supervillain (General Vod?) seems promising initially, but her role feels truncated and the character gets lost in the mix.

Thankfully the usual CGI excess is reigned in for the climax, and the mid-credits sequence (there is no post-credits one) signals a way forward for the Marvel universe and which will surprise those only those who have not been paying attention.

The Marvels is released 10th November

David Willoughby

Follow David on Twitter @DWill_Crackfilm