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In the years following the release of Avengers: Endgame, Marvel Studios was in a tight spot. It had to rebuild, and it had to do so during a time when both fan hunger and the Disney+ content machine demanded more, more, more.
As a result, Marvel had a long string of hits and misses in Phase 4, some of which amounted to cutting its own bangs in the mirror and cry-laughing at the aftermath. It had broken up with its long-term boyfriends like Iron Man and Steve Rogers and decided to go speed dating. What would be a good match for this post-Endgame Marvel? Only time, and a lot of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck, would tell.
Phase 4 sure was messy. Seven films, eight TV shows, and two specials messy. But y’know what? I’m starting to look back on those times and really appreciate all that nonsense. Not the standout stuff like WandaVision, Loki, Werewolf by Night, and Hawkeye. I already appreciated those. No, I’m talking about some of the absolutely ludicrous Phase 4 moments that certainly raised a few eyebrows at the time but can now finally get their due as gloriously weird occurrences in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Minus She-Hulk twerking. We’ve heard enough about that for a lifetime.
Please note that the following moments will not be addressed in a professional manner.
Ray Winstone’s Russian Accent Revealed
It’s no secret that I love a terrible accent, but in a movie filled with questionable Russian accents, Ray Winstone’s reigns supreme in Black Widow. Landing somewhere between Cockney and South African instead of any kind of Russian dialect, it’s clear that Winstone might have ordered his accent from Temu, and we were all left to deal with the consequences.
As the villainous overseer of the Red Room, Winstone’s turn as Dreykov is aurally challenging, to say the least, but while everyone was chuckling at his efforts to portray the Russian general we’d been hearing about since the first Avengers movie, he had a surprising supporter in dialect coach Adrienne Nelson, who seemed to enjoy it regardless. “Dreykov, his acting was so mesmerizing that the dialect issues became not so much a distraction as a curiosity,” she told Slate. “I wondered if the British and Russian colors I was hearing had to do with his backstory.”
The British colors? Certainly not a part of Dreykov’s backstory in the MCU, no, but the accent itself is so much fun! How can you stay mad at it? And though I should mention that Russell Crowe later gave Winstone a run for his money in Phase 4’s Thor: Love and Thunder, the latter’s Russian efforts win out as the best worst accent in MCU history.
Harry Styles Arrives
Eternals had a lot of problems, but its most enduring one was being the first Phase 4 movie to have a post-credits scene that was set to go absolutely nowhere. It took the cake because it briefly introduced Starfox, Thanos’s adopted brother, who was a prince and a space outlaw or something. It doesn’t really matter, let’s be honest. He never came back, nor did the Eternals themselves.
Starfox was played by pop singer and sometimes actor Harry Styles in a bit of stunt casting so blinding it that it actually hurt to look at it directly. To fully survive it, you’d have had to close your eyes like Indy and Marion at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Even then, you’d be cursed with less than 20/20 vision for all eternity.
It didn’t help that Starfox was accompanied by a Patton Oswalt-voiced Pip the Troll in some of the worst CGI the MCU has ever done, but now that all this is in my rearview, I feel like I can take almost any stunt casting Marvel can throw at me. Have Britney Spears come out at the end of Avengers: Secret Wars and blow up the multiverse, yelling, “It’s Britney, bitch.” I am now immune. I can take it. Harry Styles has prepared me for anything. Only fear is the mind-killer.
Stormbreaker’s Jealous
Stray to any Marvel Reddit thread about the worst MCU films ever and you’ll see a lot of people crowning Thor: Love and Thunder. They’ll tell you there’s no one who likes the God of Thunder’s fourquel, and that it should be consigned to the bin of Marvel Studios mistakes where it belongs. But there are people who like it! There are tens of us who didn’t really mind how silly the movie turned out after returning director Taika Waititi decided to lean much further into the wacky humor of Thor: Ragnarok, and I’d argue that one of the best bits of the film is one that its detractors bring up time and again as genuinely diabolical: Waititi’s notion that Thor’s weapons might be sentient.
During Love and Thunder, there’s a moment where Thor retreats to the bow of his Viking longship, the Aegir, and discusses Mjolnir coming back into his orbit with Stormbreaker, wondering if the latter might be jealous of the former. “Are we good?” he asks, pouring a beer on the axe. “Sorry we’ve been fighting lately.” Though there’s no indication that Thor’s doing anything other than anthropomorphizing both weapons, his banter with them is so silly that I genuinely find it delightful. You may not agree, but that’s alright. We can agree to disagree.
However, I think this kind of back-and-forth throughout Love and Thunder complements Gorr’s opposing struggle with All-Black the Necrosword, a powerful, corrupting weapon that binds his lifeforce to its blade. Positing that Mjolnir or Stormbreaker also might be sentient is a nice touch, given that all the weapons are key parts of the story.
Eh, like I said, maybe we’ll just agree to disagree on this one!
Shang-Chi Rides a Dragon
This is perhaps a controversial one because I think a lot of people very much enjoyed the final act of Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and so did I! Still, at the end of the movie, when Shang-Chi eventually mounts The Great Protector, a giant fuck-off dragon who guards the hidden realm of Ta Lo, it’s easy to ask yourself what the hell is even happening anymore, especially when this climactic moment follows a sudden run-in with Iron Man 3’s Trevor Slattery, who is bounding around with an inexplicable CGI creature, and some painful BMW product placement in the middle of an impossible forest.
All that said, I can’t be mad at a fuck-off dragon emerging from the depths and reviving our hero so that he can beat a demon hell-bent on absorbing some souls because the hero’s dad thought his dead mum might be in there somewhere. Wait, what was this movie about?
Egypt Kaiju Fight
During a final showdown between Marc Spector (Oscar Isaac) and Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke) in Marvel’s divisive Moon Knight, Egyptian gods Khonshu and Ammit get in on the action by blowing up to kaiju size and fighting each other under Cairo’s night sky. Destroying pyramids and all sorts while Spector blips in and out of his different personalities, he and Khonshu eventually emerge triumphant from the battle because of course they do; yet no one in the MCU ever mentions the wonders and consequences of this kaiju face-off ever again.
Why? Because there will be no further reason to refer to it again. Moon Knight was a “one-and-done” show for Marvel, and unlike Civil War’s key plot point that the Avengers are causing too much damage or Brave New World finally telling everyone that Tiamut’s massive Celestial corpse is rich in Adamantium, there’s simply no need to address it. What happened in Egypt stays in Egypt.
And hey, y’know what I don’t love about a kaiju fight? Nothing. Every single one is a gift. Moon Knight’s is a bit of fun nonsense that lends even greater stakes to Spector’s showdown with Harlow and the special effects aren’t terrible either. It’s ludicrous, but frankly, if all this happened in a Moon Knight comic I was reading, I’d be delighted.
Red Means Go
Back when Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness was first released in 2022, I found myself infuriated by it for various reasons. Some of those reasons were narrative and some were character-based, but there were also little things that bothered me like the fact that, given the chance to explore the big, wild multiverse, the bulk of Stephen Strange’s walking-around time was monopolized by a jaunt where he and America Chavez could revisit old memories, eat pizza balls, brush up against a wink-wink Bruce Campbell street vendor and learn that red actually means go when it comes to traffic control. It’s no three seashells.
But in the years since the sequel’s debut, I’ve come to be less annoyed by all of its missed opportunities and reliance on Raimi-isms and stunt cameos. “Red means go” is the absolute least they could do in Strange and Chavez’s multiversal bonding time, but my moaning about it actually came back to haunt me when I got a new Bosch fridge freezer and called the company’s maintenance team out to fix it, only to be told that a permanent red light glowing from the front panel was no cause for alarm and simply meant the power was on. Alas, this effectively removed my ability to complain about “red means go” forever.
Let’s Fix a Boat
Marvel’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier explored what happened after Sam Wilson received Captain America’s shield and poor Bucky Barnes was left behind on the lawn like an abandoned puppy following Steve Rogers’s return from putting back the Infinity Stones in Avengers: Endgame. As Sam and Bucky teamed up to stop an anti-patriotism group called the Flag Smashers, they bickered their way across the world and clashed with new Cap John Walker in several action-packed sequences, pausing in the penultimate episode to bond and fix up the Wilson family boat in a montage that could least damningly be described as fine and most damningly described as cringe.
In the midst of dealing with a pissed-off Walker stripped of his Captain America title, and a Flag Smasher group planning god knows what as their next explosive statement, Wilson and Barnes’s inevitable bonding sesh comes at the most irritating possible moment in the series, but I’ve started looking back at the “let’s fix a boat” scene with much less annoyance than I did at the time. After all, it was important to make sure the audience knew these guys had properly buried the hatchet of being mildly peeved with each other so they could reunite them for two minutes in Brave New World and assure us that Bucky didn’t really need all that therapy for going through decades of torture and abuse. Sometimes, fixing a boat with a new pal is just as effective. Probably. Actually, never mind.
The MCU’s Briefest Mask
We’re not leaving The Falcon and the Winter Soldier behind just yet, because the limited series also gave us one of the most “oh, come on” moments ever when it first streamed on Disney+.
Having previously released a teaser video of Baron Helmut J. Zemo’s return following the carnage he caused in Captain America: Civil War, I was initially delighted to see that Daniel Brühl, reprising his villainous role from that MCU threequel, would be sporting his iconic purple mask in the upcoming show.
Technically, Marvel delivered. Zemo pops his mask on for about 30 seconds during a shootout in Madripoor with Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier after retrieving it from his family’s storage garage. But 30 seconds wasn’t enough for me. As a longtime Zemo fan, thrilled that he was coming back to the MCU, I just felt utterly deflated that he only wore his mask for as long as it took to close some browser tabs.
But hey, at least I did get to see Baron Zemo in his purple mask, albeit briefly. And since the character is still alive in the MCU, maybe I’ll get to see it again one day. Here’s hoping.
Any ludicrous but fun Phase 4 moments lingering for you? As always, let me know in the comments!
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