The poignant handling of Chadwick Boseman’s death is a high point in this elegiac but uninspired sequel
★★
Marvel has a sequel problem. As good as it is at stitching its movies into a grand overarching framework, the individual follow-ups have often stunk the place up. From Iron Man 2 and Ant-Man and the Wasp to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and (eesh) Thor: The Dark World, they’ve been plagued by unconvincing villains, character development stuck in neutral and screenplays with an obvious half-eye on servicing the next instalments.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever has more going for it than those MCU B-sides, but it still falls a long way short of recapturing the exhilarating glories of director Ryan Coogler’s 2018 smash hit. The visual and storytelling flaws here are only exacerbated by the seriously unsnappy runtime (they’re really not kidding with the whole ‘forever’ thing).
It starts beautifully. In a prologue guaranteed to send a shiver down the spine, the send-off to the late Chadwick Boseman is delivered with all the deftness we’ve come to expect from the super-franchise. It’s a lovely moment, with even the Marvel ident delivered in respectful silence: a touching double farewell to the man and his character, King T’Challa.
Wakanda Forever is also an effective showcase for its ace cast. Letitia Wright comes into her own in what’s essentially a coming-of-age story for the scientifically-minded, grieving Shuri. Winston Duke offers a richly entertaining line in Falstaffian pisstaking as tribal leader M’Baku, while Danai Gurira gets a lovely arc as the badass leader of the elite Dora Milaje. And Angela Bassett is, well, Angela Bassett as the kingdom’s ruling monarch and T’Challa’s broken-hearted mum.
But as much love and goodwill as there is for this frequently dazzling, Afrofuturist corner of the MCU and its characters, the story itself is full of Marvel punch-pulling. The politics are blurred, with a western imperialist threat to Wakanda’s all-powerful vibranium resources established only for another more vanilla menace to elbow it out the way. Which is as dull as it sounds.
It falls a long way short of recapturing the exhilarating glories of the first movie
And that menace, comic-book OG Namor (he first appeared in 1939’s Marvel Comics #1), isn’t a radical departure from the comic-book playbook, for all his inner conflict. Supercharged with charisma by Narcos: Mexico actor Tenoch Huerta, he’s the leader of a bland aquatic people with Aztec inspiration called the Talokan, who reaches out to the Wakandan queen Ramonda (Bassett) hoping to find common cause against the vibranium-craving Americans.
He’s an antihero rather than an out-and-out villain, but with his winged feet and formidable superpowers (‘He’s like the Hulk can fly,’ one Wakandan marvels), you know he’ll end up doing villainous things – albeit while looking a bit like the logo of a new courier company.
Of the film’s two CG-heavy environments, the gleaming Metropolis-like cityscape of Wakanda and its wintry landscapes and tropical rivers shows up better than its murky, wonder-free undersea realm. But with Wakanda Forever mostly pinballing between the two, the lack of visual texture becomes jarring.
And like the umpteenth chaste lesbian peck on the cheek to appear in a Disney film (this one featuring a wasted Michaela Coel), Wakanda Forever gestures at one thing and mostly delivers something else. A baked-in corporate anxiety not to alienate a chunk of its audience feels like a handbrake on bolder story choices.
Maybe it’s enough that franchise filmmaking has made such huge strides in representation and diversity. But the stories need to feel radical too, and this one goes nowhere fast.
In cinemas worldwide Fri Nov 11.