Black Panther: Wakanda Forever suffers from a giant, Chadwick Boseman-shaped hole that it can’t fill, no matter how many characters, storylines, and muddled, chaotic action sequences it tries to throw on the screen. In the wake of the actor’s shocking 2020 death from cancer, returning director Ryan Coogler, who wrote the script with Joe Robert Cole, chose not to turn inward with a smaller, reflective film on the loss of Boseman’s Black Panther. The character’s death is central to the narrative (and allows for a few poignantly meta moments early on), but mostly it functions as a pole from which to hang so many subplots that we don’t know whose story the movie wants to tell: that of angry sister Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright); grieving mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett, earning her paycheck in goddess mode); loyal general Okoye (Danai Gurira); or devastated lover Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o). Then there is Namor (Tenoch Huerta), the king of a secret, undersea society. Based on a Marvel Comics character, he is here envisioned as a militant Mayan justice warrior. Having fled to the sea hundreds of years ago to escape Spanish colonizers, Namor’s people are now preparing to wage war against all surface oppressors—and they’re demanding Wakanda’s help, or else. (I’ll leave it to others to decide if the Mesoamerican elements of the film count as cultural appropriation; it would be ironic if this series, so careful in its consideration of African traditions in Black Panther, would be accused of this.) The underwater settings make for a dreary mise en scene—even in a sequence where we’re supposed to be wowed by the beauty of Namor’s kingdom. That, along with the fact that we have no central figure in whom to be fully invested, makes Wakanda Forever a surprising slog. (I almost forgot to mention Dominique Thorne, whose genius MIT student gets shoved into the proceedings for an Ironheart origin story.) There’s a smaller, quieter story about solace buried somewhere in here, but Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe has no interest in that.
(11/8/2022)
