Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Marvel Misses Again
/****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A bloated and bland mess of a movie that is firmly in the bottom tier of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, the sequel to the billion-dollar blockbuster Marvel movie Black Panther (2018), premiered in theatres back on November 11th, and is now available on Disney Plus, and I just watched it and have some thoughts.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been in steep decline since the glory days of late last decade when Infinity War (2018) and Endgame (2019) both made over two billion dollars in back-to-back years.
Since that creative and financial high point Marvel has stumbled and bumbled by churning out a plethora of abysmal movies, like Black Widow, Eternals and Shang-Chi, that featured second and third-rate characters, all of which underperformed at the box office.
Even the most financially successful movie of this era (I’m not counting the Spider-Man movies which are Sony/Marvel movies and not Disney/Marvel movies), Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which made over $900 million at the box office, was a pretty awful affair.
In reading the tea leaves it seemed to me that the key film in judging the overall creative and financial health of the MCU going forward would be Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder which hit theatres this past Summer. Thor: Love and Thunder was the sequel to Waititi’s glorious Thor: Ragnarok, one of the very best Marvel movies ever made. If any movie was going to stop the bleeding at Marvel it would be Love and Thunder. And then I saw Love and Thunder.
Love and Thunder did not stop the bleeding. It was just as awful as the rest of the post-Endgame Disney/Marvel movies, and it massively underperformed at the box office, bringing in just $761 million on a bloated $250 million budget. Not good.
After Love and Thunder failed, the next big Marvel bellwether, if not its backstop, was the highly anticipated Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. Unfortunately for Marvel, I can report that Wakanda Forever didn’t stop the bleeding either.
Wakanda Forever, directed and co-written by the same man who made the original, Ryan Coogler, did do better than Love and Thunder, but it didn’t do much better as it made $842 million on a $250 million budget. Compared to the original Black Panther, which made $1.38 billion and garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, Wakanda Forever massively under-performed financially, to the tune of nearly half a billion less than the original.
An easy explanation for that precipitous box office drop-off is that Black Panther starred Chadwick Boseman – who tragically died of cancer in 2020. The great hurdle for Wakanda Forever to overcome was the loss of Boseman who was slated to star in the film. After his death Ryan Coogler and Disney shifted gears and, instead of recasting another actor as Black Panther, came up with a story not just in Boseman’s absence but which is centered around his absence.
Chadwick Boseman certainly seemed like a very nice guy but I never found him to be very charismatic or compelling on-screen, even in the original Black Panther, my review of which I think stands up quite well five years later. While Black Panther with Boseman felt charisma-challenged to me, Wakanda Forever without Boseman is like a black hole of anti-charisma that sucks all light and life into its darkness leaving behind a dull, dismal and distinctly lifeless-void.
The convoluted plot of Wakanda Forever revolves around the death of King T’Challa (Boseman) and how it effects his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright), his mother Ramonda (Angela Bassett), and the people of Wakanda.
On top of King T’Challa’s death, Wakanda and its royal family are confronted by the superhero/supervillain Namor, a flying Aquaman type guy who is king of the Talokan people, who live deep in the sea as a result of European colonialism in Latin America. Sigh.
Through an incoherent course of events Namor looks to ally with Wakanda to create an alliance of anti-oppressors, but in turn he demands that a brilliant, young, African-American girl from Chicago who is studying at MIT, Riri Williams, be killed first because she developed a special machine, the only one of its kind, that can detect vibranium – the stuff that makes Wakanda superior and which was just discovered deep in the ocean near Talokan. Shuri and Queen Ramonda balk at Namor’s Riri killing proposal and try to protect her, which puts Wakanda at war with Talokan.
The result of all of this is foolishness is that Wakanda Forever is a bloated, bland and boring two-hours and forty minutes long. It’s action and fight sequences are uncomfortably amateurish. It’s CGI is second, if not third-rate. Its cinematography is stilted and flat. And its script and narrative are embarrassing and incorrigibly trite. Besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?
In keeping with the tedious and relentless Disney/Marvel agenda, race and gender swapping is rampant in Wakanda Forever. Namor in the Marvel comics is a white/Atlantean/Asian guy, but in the movie, he has been remade – or race-swapped, into an indigenous Central American god who loathes the European colonizers who killed his culture and family. Yawn.
Then there’s Riri Williams, who is basically a black girl Iron Man with her own Iron Man suit to boot. And to no one’s surprise, the new Black Panther is a black woman too, as Shuri dons the new Black Panther outfit. You go girls!!
The recent spate of Marvel films and tv shows have all centered women and women of color, and all the white male characters have been replaced with either women, minorities or women minorities…and frankly, they have all suffered for it.
Thankfully there is a white guy in Wakanda Forever, he’s the flaccid, cuckold CIA agent (Martin Freeman) who gets duped by his much smarter and more powerful ex-wife (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss). Down with the patriarchy!!
All of this agenda driven nonsense wouldn’t concern me in the least, it really wouldn’t, if the movie was at least well-made and/or mildly entertaining. It is neither. It is, at best, a middling, lower-level Marvel movie. It’s better than Eternals, but that’s not exactly a high bar.
As for the performances, they are for the most part underwhelming.
Angela Bassett has been nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her work as grief-stricken mother Queen Ramonda. Bassett is…fine. She’s always a very compelling screen presence and I’m sure she’ll win the Oscar and I’ll be happy for her because she seems like a good person, but I’m not so sure she deserves it for this role.
Letitia Wright as Shuri on the other hand is an absolute mystery to me. I thought she was terrible in Black Panther and I find her equally terrible in this. First off, she’s playing a teenager/young woman and yet she looks like she’s in her mid-fifties. Secondly, she is so devoid of magnetism she might as well be invisible.
Dominique Thorne is another mystery. Her work as Riri Williams is so shallow and predictable as to be caricature. Her acting is of the tired style that has become so common nowadays – where preening and posing passes for artistry. Hopefully Thorne will grow out of pretending and mugging for the camera and actually start acting.
Tenoch Huerta Mejia plays Namor and is completely lifeless. For a guy fueled by revenge he’s got nothing going on behind his eyes. It would also be a good idea if you’re going to play a superhero/villain to maybe hit the gym for a bit, especially if you’re going to be shirtless for the entirety of the movie. Tough to suspend disbelief when some doughy son of a bitch is trying to pass himself off as some super strong being. Hell, if doughy dudes could be superheroes…I’d be the fucking Hulk, Wolverine and Thor combined. Meija is so doughy they would’ve been better off casting the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man in the role of Namor, but that would never have been allowed because that fat sack of shit is too white.
On the bright side in regards to Wakanda Forever, I thought showing only Chadwick Boseman as Black Panther in the Marvel Title Sequence – which usually features all the superheroes, was a classy tribute. On the other hand, the film’s use of Boseman’s death to promote itself and generate ticket sales feels exploitative to me. I understand that it’s a tough tightrope to walk…I’m just uncomfortable with that type of thing.
Another issue that Wakanda Forever brings up for me is in regards to writer/director Ryan Coogler. It seems pretty obvious at this point that Coogler, despite his promising start with Fruitvale Station, is simply not a good filmmaker. I’ll be interested to see what he does now and if he moves away from these franchise films – something he’d be wise to do. But I wonder if the protective bubble of franchise films is protecting him and deflecting criticism of his ability. Regardless, he’s not done anything good since Fruitvale Station.
The bottom line regarding Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is that it is just another in the long line of recent Marvel movies to be utterly and entirely forgettable. There really is no need whatsoever for you waste your time and see this movie, even for “free” on Disney Plus.
At this point, after the failures of Love and Thunder and Wakanda Forever, the Marvel Cinematic Universe feels mortally wounded and I’m having a difficult time imaging a scenario where it rebounds from the dual plagues of audience Marvel fatigue and Disney/Marvel’s creative bankruptcy.
In terms of the future, Marvel seems to be going all in on the woke agenda stuff, which, love it or loathe it, has proven over and over again to be toxic to large swaths of the viewing public, most notably the most rabid and die-hard of Marvel fans.
The biggest problem though is that regardless of any political and cultural messages ingrained into Marvel movies, if the movies themselves and the characters they feature are not high quality and compelling, then they will quickly become entirely irrelevant in the blink of an eye. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is stark proof of that.
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