Black Panther: Wakanda Forever - Spectacularly Competent Franchise Reinvention, Minus Black Panther
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B-minus
Sometimes film critics find themselves outside of popular opinion. I can't assume where popular opinion will fall with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But I suspect anything less than an enthusiastic review will irritate fans.
There may be a few whose opinions fall somewhere between champion and detractor—I'd be of the in-between crowd if fence-sitting weren't such a bad look for a critic.
Sides must be taken.
Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) ponders the future of Wakanda in Wakanda Forever
But am I a detractor? That seems harsh. Wakanda Forever is far from a failure, except that where there should be excellence, there is a middling feeling of watching something spectacularly competent.
As far as I can tell, Marvel doesn't do competent. And in the Marvel Universe, Black Panther—after only one previous film—is one of Marvel's most regarded commodities. So, where competence might provide some relief given the cultural, socio, and political baggage attached, over-competence inspires disappointment.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever feels like a two-hour and forty-one-minute detour. But it's a detour no one wanted to write: a prologue without the title character. Worse. Without Chadwick Boseman, the actor who brought the character to life.
Boseman is so synonymous with Black Panther that they retired the character when he died in 2020 instead of recasting it. To do otherwise, it seems, would be to dishonour Boseman's performance. This after appearing in one full-length Black Panther movie.
So, not only did director Ryan Coogler have to contend with the massive weight of the first film—a film Coogler also directed—but he was left with reinventing the Black Panther franchise without Black Panther, or at least with creating a plausible scenario that amounts to the same.
The film clocks in sometime after Black Panther took on Killmonger, proving his rightful place as the King of Wakanda. But much has happened since then, including the death of T'Challa, aka Black Panther, from an unspecified disease.
If you're wondering, replacing Black Panther is a hot topic throughout the film. There's a brief pause for a metaphysical moment when King T'Challa's sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), is fretting over building a defense to replace her brother.
But Shuri hides a darker motivation by burying herself in her work, fearing what might surface if she doesn't.
In steps Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett).
Ramonda is capable of a drop-the-mike rebuttal at a particularly hostile U.N. interrogation. However, when it comes to Shuri, her surviving child, Ramonda is all parent. It's here, with characters at their most vulnerable, that Coogler excels.
It can be hard to recognize Coogler as the same director who debuted with Fruitvale Station (2010). Although distant, there are echoes of Wanda (Octavia Spencer) from Fruitvale Station written into Ramonda—not the least of which is an instinct to tirelessly love their children.
Wakanda Forever is a busy movie with a wider cultural outreach than its predecessor. But there are no unauthorized superhero cameos to crash the party (unless you consider Martin Freeman reprising his role as Everett, their man on the inside, heroic). There are plenty of references, from Transformers to Titanic, plus a scene that might have the unintentional effect of making one nostalgic for Ray Harryhausen to help carry you through the film’s two-hours-and-forty-minutes of screen time.
Like the first Black Panther movie, the contrast between the hero and villain is not easily determined. Namor (Tenoch Huerta), more antagonist than villain, is a winged heel god with a circus strongman's physique (and a presence in Marvel comics since 1939). He simply wishes to protect the people he witnessed enslaved and driven into an underwater existence after being given a poorly researched vaccine.
(I'm sorry, is that an anti-vaccine message being slipped into a Marvel movie?).
The water landscape Namor and his blue—more Vishna-blue than Avatar-blue--people live in is an excellent stab at visualizing a sustainable underwater paradise. Still, suppose its purpose is to incite that same breathtaking wonder that struck us when first seeing Wakanda. It succeeds, even in that case, but not before leaving a filmy layer of one-up-man-ship.
In the Marvel universe, the measure of a film's success is economical over artistic. Wakanda Forever has already made $45 million in presales.
By this standard, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a massive accomplishment for the studio, but artistically, it's earned its place safe from the rush of the upcoming holiday releases.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is directed by Ryan Coogler and stars Angela Bassett, Tenoch Huerta, and Letitia Wright. Black Panther: Wakanda Foreveropens in selected theatres on Thursday, November 10, 2022.