Spoiler Alert
As one who found Ryan Coogler’s first Black Panther (2018) only slightly better than average and bewilderingly overrated, without begrudging anyone who enjoyed it for its cultural resonance, I looked sceptically at the prospect of another, this time lacking even Chadwick Boseman’s gravitas in the lead role. That said, Boseman’s King T’Challa sometimes felt close to an extra in his own story in Coogler’s massively successful, zeitgeist-altering film, surrounded as he was by variously scene-stealing characters and performances.
With the likes of Danai Gurira’s Okoye, Lupita Nyong’o’s Nakia, Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger, and Winston Duke’s M’Baku on hand, and his girl science genius sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) also in the mix, T’Challa himself was shrunken from the strikingly ambiguous presence he was in Captain America: Civil War (2016) to be just another angsty, romantically-challenged princeling. Coogler and his overlords at Disney-Marvel made the consequential choice of not recasting T’Challa, but frankly I barely noticed the character’s absence in Wakanda Forever, a mega-budgeted, self-consciously imperious (if nominally anti-imperialist) sequel.
Or I would have barely noticed, but Wakanda Forever is surprisingly devoted to exploring T’Challa’s absence as a deeply private and transfiguring pain for his mother, now Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), and Shuri.
The film opens with Shuri anguished by her failure to find a cure for a mysterious disease killing her brother. His inevitable passing becomes a moment of mourning and reflection for Wakanda, as it’s trying at once to engage with the world as T’Challa wanted whilst maintaining its traditional imperviousness to external pressure and grasping, now that other countries are more desperate than ever to get their hands on some of their Vibranium resources.
Early in the film Ramonda parades some captured French special ops soldiers who tried to steal some Vibranium in a secret raid before a UN assembly. But Wakanda still lacks its traditional superhuman defender in the Black Panther, as Killmonger’s extermination of the Vibranium-enriched flower that was the source of his power has thus far proven total.
Meanwhile the US is seeking out other Vibranium resources with a newly-developed detector, and locates a deposit off the coast of Yucatan, but this attention provokes an attack by a mysterious race of blue-skinned, underwater-dwelling people from another hidden nation, called Talokan.
Nakia’s search for Shuri and Riri and her swashbuckling rescue of them, for instance, should be a major set-piece sequence, but is instead given short shrift and plays out in a rather random and unconvincing manner. This scene is also supposed to be a major plot catalyst, leading to the notion that someone supposedly as powerful and experienced in being a nation’s ruler as Namor is going to fly off the handle and go on a punitive expedition to avenge one random victim of a situation he himself caused.
Okay, he’s supposed to be arrogant and unreasonable, but like all the plot pretexts in the film it’s just too goddamn thin. Louis-Dreyfus is impressively bitchy in her scenes as Allegra, the new, patently chauvanist face of state power in the MCU, but her and Ross’s scenes are mere afterthoughts.
The finale is also frustrating for the tactical silliness of it all, with the Wakandans giving up their chief advantage, being land dwellers going to war with sub-mariners, and taking the Talokanil on from a ship. Shuri works to contrive Namor’s capture whilst Riri runs interference in a new, fancy Iron Man suit and with the deliriously silly spectacle of two nation-states with flying ships and vast energy and technological resources duking it out with spears. Coogler is still only okay at staging action scenes – the one-on-one fights like Shuri and Namor’s final duel are dynamic, but the absence of a strong conceptual imagination is plain in the goofiness of the shipboard battle.
There’s a twist delivered in the compulsory mid-credits sequences which is fairly predictable, regarding just what Nakia was doing in Haiti, but it does stitch a meaningful finishing touch on the film’s emotional tapestry. Wakanda Forever is certainly a film of shreds and patches, as silly and clumsy as often as it’s impressive and heartfelt. But, as I often seem to, I found myself warming to a vision when it’s clearly struggling, liking the wayward excess of this more than the first film, and feeling more engaged by flashes of Coogler’s most expansive imagination here than on any of his previous efforts.
