Movie Number 40 of 2022
The Film: Wakanda Forever
The Cinema: Hoyts Victoria Gardens
Stars: 3.75
I like getting my Marvel fix every now and then. Marvel is good. Often funny, not too gory or violent. Great characters. A part of a universe which is ever expanding. What's not to love?
In this film, a little bit.
There is a lot to like about this film as well, and I'll get to that, but my main criticism of this is that it's about half an hour too long. Most of the action scenes are over-egged and the film wouldn't have suffered if some of these were curtailed. This is why I couldn't give this four stars. It was just that little bit too long.
This aside, Wakanda Forever is a really solid film, which does a lot of things well.
This all takes place after the death of T'Challa (a posthumus Chadwick Boseman, who passed away from cancer in 2020). This was handled brilliantly, giving fitting homage to a great character, and a great actor.
Once the rites are over, the time jumps a year. The rest of the world is holding Wakanda to account for their use of Vibranium, a mysterious element which holds a great deal of power. What the rest of the world doesn't know about is that there is another source of Vibranium, found under the sea, which is powering another tribe of underwater people. This group are angry with Wakanda for letting the rest of the world know about this. Wakanda is pretty miffed that an American student, RiRi (Dominique Thorne) has got the smarts to find the stuff out.
And that's where all the action starts as we see the Wakandans and the Tulukan tribe from under the see battle it out.
What is really good about this film is that it looks at a family's grief without making it schmaltzy. This takes small episodes of grief, both of Shuri (Leticia Wright), her mother (Angela Bassett) and Wakanda, and uses this as a launching pad for the next bit of the story. This is where the film really succeeds.
It also weaves in Marvel legend as well as giving the world something to think about.
Wakanda Forever, like its predecessor Black Panther, has an almost exclusively black cast, and many of the baddies are white. Richard Schiff and Julia Louis Dreyfus provide some wonderful cameos. And Martin Freeman's Elliot Ross returns - he's great.
But this doesn't make up for the fact that the direction is a little patchy at times, failing to make the mark in some of the action scenes, but scoring well on an emotional level. If only they'd been a little more ruthless, this could have gone from a good film to a great film.
As Marvel has shown in past, sometimes it needs these 'gateway' films, like The Avengers: Infinity War (the one where half the population dies) to bring on the next stage of events. We're coming to the end of the fourth phase of the Marvel Universe. I see this film as being a gateway into the next phase. It's set everything up nicely.
This too, is Leticia Wright's film. She does a great job as the new Black Panther. She's smart, funny and she kicks arse.
It's just a pity this is half an hour too long. I may have been a fraction more forgiving if I'd boned up on the original Black Panther film beforehand too. I remember that one being great. This one doesn't quite meet that standard.
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