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CAPTAIN MARVEL

Grade: C

It’s odd that while the folks at Warners appear to be moving away from the benighted Zack Snyder blueprint for the DC Universe to something resembling the crowd-pleasing Marvel formula, with this newest entry in its seemingly endless series the Marvel Universe has taken a turn toward the DC model. It’s not just that in plot terms “Captain Marvel” bears an uncanny resemblance to the (admittedly pre-Snyder) “Green Lantern”—both are about fighter pilots endowed with super-powers by an alien race who must learn to deal with them. It’s that the darker, grimmer style lacks the sense of comic-book fun that’s been part of the Marvel formula; yes, there are jokes and gags, but they mostly land with a thud.

Of course, much has been made of the fact that this is the first MU movie with a female at its center, though the DU beat it to the punch with “Wonder Woman.” It would be nice to report that it proves as winning a game-changer as “Black Panther,” which broke the white male mold in another way. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.

The Captain Marvel character has gone through numerous iterations since it was introduced as a man from outer space in comic form in 1967. A Ms. Marvel followed a decade later; she was Carol Danvers, a fighter pilot and love interest for the captain in the earlier series reborn as a superheroine, but her stand-alone series didn’t last long. She did, however, assume the Captain Marvel identity in 2012, and has since starred in a succession of mini-series, including an eleventh one, just launched. The script by directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck (along with their collaborator Geneva Robertson-Dworet) is based—loosely—on this latest version.

Danvers is here introduced in the person of Vers (Brie Larson), a member of military of the Kree, an other-world race engaged in a war against a shape-shifting enemy called the Skrulls. She’s young and possessed of special powers, but inexperienced and rash, which is why she’s operating under the guidance of an experienced mentor, Yon-Rogg (Jude Law), in whose squad—among whom are Korarth (Djimon Hounsou) and Minn-Erva (Gemma Chan)—she goes on a mission to bring a Kree spy in from the cold.

Unhappily, the mission goes awry and she’s captured. During her interrogation she experiences bursts of past memories of her childhood and life on earth as—you guessed it—a pilot with ties to a brilliant scientist named Lawson (Annette Bening), who looks suspiciously like the Kree A.I. Supreme Intelligence. In escaping she sets off an explosion that thrusts her, rather fortuitously, to earth, in 1995, the era of Blockbusters, Radio Shack and very slow computers (artifacts which the screenplay is at pains to milk for laughs).

She’s soon paired up with an initially incredulous low-level S.H.I.E.L.D. agent, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson, made to look younger, though rather glacéd, by the same “fountain of youth” CGI process used on Michael Douglas in the Ant-Man movies). They’re soon pursued by S.H.I.E.L.D., whose head Keller (Ben Mendelsohn) is really Skrull leader Talos in disguise, as well as by Yon-Rogg and his crew.

Why? The answer is related not only to who Danvers really is but who the Kree and the Skrulls really are. The movie eventually tells us, though in a rather laborious—some would say slapdash—way, complicated by the Skrulls’ habit of shape-shifting whenever useful (as well as uninspired direction). Instrumental in recovering Danvers’ past is an old friend, an ex-pilot named Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch) and her spunky daughter Monica (Akira Akbar). It also reveals the extent of Danvers’ powers, which seem to increase spontaneously whenever the plot demands it and ultimately reach so enormous a level that she’s able to fend off an invasion of earth from the skies single-handedly. In all this the original male captain has disappeared altogether, but playing a prominent part in the goings-on is a cat named Goose.

There’s some pleasure to be had in the movie, which runs to a relatively trim two hours, including credits that include a couple of bonus clips, which look ahead to the upcoming “Avengers: Endgame,” in which Marvel will obvious be a significant figure. And Mendelsohn, when he’s in his Talos makeup (mostly in the last act) shows how to deliver an amusing line to best advantage.

Otherwise, though, “Marvel” is far from marvelous. Though Larson is a fine actress, she proves nothing special here; one could drop “Supergirl” Melissa Benoist into the part without noticing the difference. Jackson does his usual shtick, but you’ll probably be so fascinated by his odd appearance that little else will register, especially since the banter between him and Larson is so flat. Law sneers and spits out his dialogue, while Bening is wasted. Lynch and Akbar come on a mite strong, but they’re an agreeable pair. Reggie, the cat that mostly plays Goose (three other felines are also involved) outacts them all.

Nor are the effects all that special. Much of the pre-earth material early on is so darkly shot by cinematographer Ben Davis that the images are murky, and the final confrontation with a space fleet that provides a big finale is distinctly underwhelming. Whatever else you might say about these Marvel Universe movies, they’ve been sumptuously mounted. This one looks threadbare by comparison.

Though this is a stumble in Marvel-Disney’s plan to conquer the cinematic universe, fanboys can content themselves with the knowledge that two more MU movies are expected in the coming months—the new “Avengers” and a “Spider-Man” sequel. The deluge will go on, and further Captain Marvel pictures will undoubtedly be a part of it.

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COLD PURSUIT

Grade: B+

As a general rule, when European directors do English-language remakes of their home-grown successes, the result is pretty dismal; perhaps the most egregious example is “The Vanishing,” Dutch director George Sluizer’s chilling 1988 tale of a man’s obsessive search for his missing girlfriend that he turned into a laughably inept Hollywood bomb five years later. Happily Norwegian helmer Hans Petter Moland breaks the pattern with this reworking of his 2014 movie “Kraftidioten” (released here as “In Order of Disappearance”). “Cold Pursuit” is every bit as good as, and in some ways superior to, the original.

That’s not only because Moland’s skill hasn’t deserted him in the move from Norway to Alberta (where the film was shot), and because it provides a solid vehicle for Liam Neeson to tweak his stern action-hero persona to good effect, but because neophyte screenwriter Frank Baldwin, adapting Kim Fupz Aakeson’s script, has found clever solutions to the problems posed by the geographical change in the plot, and has retained—even amplified—the mordant humor that permeated the first film. The result is a genuine surprise, in the best sense.

The picture is basically a revenge story in the vein of the “Death Wish” formula, the targets in this case being the drug dealers that Neeson’s Nels Coxman blames for the death of his son Kyle (Micheál Richardson). Nels is the reliable snow plow driver in small-town Kehoe, Colorado, which has long depended on him to keep the major arteries open in the worst blizzards. Kyle worked as a baggage loader at the Denver airport, and is kidnapped and killed by a scurvy type named Speedo (Michael Eklund), who makes the death look like a heroin overdose—a conclusion the cops quickly accept despite Nels’ insistence that the boy was not an addict.

Kyle’s death creates a rupture in Nels’ relationship with his wife Grace (Laura Dern), who soon leaves him. In his grief Nels is prepared to commit suicide until Dante (Wesley MacInnes) arrives, beaten up, to tell him that Kyle was murdered as a result of a smuggling operation gone wrong. He also reveals that Speedo was the killer.

Nels takes it upon himself to track down Speedo and take his vengeance—but not before extracting the name of Speedo’s immediate boss in the operation—a bridal-gown shop owner called Limbo (Bradley Stryker), who becomes his next victim. Before Limbo breathes his last, Nels gets another name—of a big guy nicknamed Santa (Michael Adamthwaite), whom he intercepts with a briefcase full of cocaine. He kills the guy and disposes of the drugs.

By this time Nels’ work has grabbed the attention of the dead men’s cartel chief, a preening Denver yuppie called Viking (Tom Bateman), who assumes that the disappearances are the work of Native American cartel boss White Bull (Tom Jackson), with whom he’s long had a tense agreement to respect each other’s territory. (In the original the opposing cartel was Serbian, and the change Baldwin’s contrived here provides ample opportunity for witty cultural observations.) When Viking recklessly orders a hit to retaliate, the victim turns out to be White Bull’s own son, and the act sets off a turf war that will eventually endanger Viking’s precocious, sensitive son Ryan (Nicholas Holmes), over whom Viking–who offers the boy “Lord of the Flies” as a teaching tool of conduct–and his ex-wife (Julia Jones) are constantly fighting, and bring both gangs to Kehoe for a showdown.

Nels, meanwhile, continues his vendetta, enlisting his ex-gangland brother Brock (William Forsythe) to provide inside advice that leads him to hire a hit-man called The Eskimo (Arnold Pinnock) to take out Viking. Nibbling around the edges of everything that’s happening is eager Kehoe policewoman Kim Dash (Emily Rossum), whose banter with her older, cynical partner Gip Gipsky (John Doman) provides a streak of puckish humor that contrasts with the periodic bursts of violence and script’s darker jokes that begin with a slow-moving machine at the Denver morgue and continue through a final ghoulish gag involving a paragliding accident initiated when White Bull and his crew show up at the Kehoe ski lodge—and include adding little crosses with the appropriate names each time another corpse is added to the enormous body count. The bit even continues into the cast listing in the closing credits, which hearkens back to the American title of the Norwegian original.

Moland handles most of the film with exceptional skill. True, the exteriors often look more Nordic than Coloradan, but Philip Øgaard’s cinematography is superb, and while the final confrontation between the two gang cartels isn’t terribly well choreographed, editor Nicolaj Monberg generally keeps the convoluted plot twists comprehensible (including a subplot involving Viking’s lieutenant Mustang, played by Domenick Lombardozzi, that explains why White Bull and his gang show u to do battle with Viking’s crew when they do). Jorgen Stangebye Larsen’s production design is also estimable (Viking’s and Brock’s modernist houses, Nels’ rustic one, the Kehoe ski lodge interior and the antique warehouse White Bull uses as a headquarters are especially impressive), and George Fenton’s score, which mixes sternness with almost jocular lightness, is refreshingly different.

The picture also offers strong acting, beginning with Neeson, who brings his customary toughness to Nels, without having to resort to the super-he-man poses of most of his action vehicles. But Moland secures excellent turns from all of his crowded cast, from Bateman and Jackson, who offer contrasting portraits of crime kingpins (the former as over-the-top as Jimmy Cagney in “White Heat,” the latter as laid-back as Chief Dan George) and the various members of their respective crews, through Rossum and Doman (who ably bounce Berman’s snappy lines back and forth) and even young Holmes (who makes Ryan one of the most likable tykes to appear onscreen in a while).

In short, this is a Liam Neeson vehicle unlike most of those that have made him a later-in-life action star: it’s much more like “A Walk Among the Tombstones” than “Taken,” and all the better for it. “Cold Pursuit” is a worthy English adaptation of its cunning Norwegian source, both exciting and morbidly funny, often simultaneously. If you enjoyed “Hell or High Water,” give it a shot.