'Captain Marvel' is a bit of a cheesy mess with great bits

Captain Marvel had some big shoes to fill. Last year gave us the superhero genre's first Best Picture nominee -- the game-changing Black Panther -- and it also delivered one of the more memorable and surprisingly resonant Marvel films -- Avengers: Infinity War. Both films became all-time grossers at the box office.

Because it's an intermittently fun but also frequently disjointed followup, Captain Marvel is almost sure to be a disappointment.

Of course, the fault is not in having a strong female lead at its center (the first for this Marvel universe), in fact that's probably it's best strength, since Brie Larson's plucky optimism is a nice departure from the usual quippy or stoic leading men that usually populate these types of films.

The movie simply doesn't have a consistent or engrossing tone. The best Marvel movies have a strong aesthetic, some legit world-building and character development -- this film doesn't have much of any of these, save for some very amusing spoofs of mid-90s culture.

However, the storytelling here is very muddled, with time jumps, alternative timelines and universes and a tacked on ending linking it to the extended universe. It doesn't feel as self assured as many Marvel movies. For instance, I think of Iron Man as the quintessential origin story -- it never lost your interest and it by and large had a story and script which connected the dots.

Captain Marvel far too often feels like a movie you walked into halfway through at the beginning -- I couldn't begin to explain Annette Bening's character and Jude Law's would be a close second in terms of coherence for me (he seems to be here to mansplain his way into a punchline).

Far better here is Samuel L. Jackson who appears decades younger thanks to state-of-the-art de-aging technology, although it's weird to see the usually badass Nick Fury played as more of a lovable lug. There's a gag with him and a cuddly cat that's wonderful at first and then very tiresome, but he's a humanizing presence throughout.

And Ben Mendelsohn practically steals the movie doing some great deadpan comedy acting under what looks like pounds of make-up -- he feels like he deserves a better movie, although I was frequently entertained throughout this one.

Brie Larson is a very appealing presence but I don't think the movie does a great job of defining her character as much more than a slightly sassier version of Captain America. But, all of that aside, the audience I saw it with seemed to really enjoy it and I think her character will be a delight for women especially who have been hungry to see more blockbusters centered on them.

And, the film refreshingly doesn't saddle her with a love interest, even though there seems to be some chemistry there between her and her fellow pilot Maria Rambeau.

It's not reinventing anything, it probably won't win any awards (even the visual effects are pretty routine looking) but it's diverting enough to justify its existence. We'll see if like Thor, who had a similarly just ok debut, Captain Marvel will have more time to win our hearts.