Captain Marvel (Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, 2019)

Despite its commanding commercial lead over its DC rival, the people behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe still seem to be suffering from Superman envy, and have acted accordingly to bring forth cosmically-powered hero of their own. Not surprisingly, in keeping with the current rather forced trend towards broadening the race and gender profiles of action protagonists, the character is a woman too, and a ballsy one to boot. This is all fine, but the twin demands of dragging us through yet another origin story (here, done piecemeal through increasingly complete flashbacks) and then providing something awesome for the hero to accomplish can't be staved off. And then there is also the perennial need to graft the finished product to the rest of the MCU. So the freedoms of the makers are severely constrained from the outset. This is, of course, a burden of all introductory hero franchises, but some do manage to overcome it through subverting the formula enough, and Captain Marvel does not really manage that. The cookie-cutter villains are after a cookie-cutter object of power and it's up to the amnesiac hero to fly around, punch and zap things until they desist. Actually, the best thing turns out to be Brie Larson as the lead; much panned by fanboys with suspect agendas for having the gall to be a woman who's abrasive and arrogant, it's her embracing of those flaws that gives the character some colour. But it's not enough to distinguish it from the crowd.

5/10