REVIEW: BLACK PANTHER 2

[number six]

I was quite curious about how you can make a Black Panther movie without you know.. Black Panther but here we are.

First off the death of Chadwick Boseman permeates this movie, his loss hangs over the entire story. This make sense as the loss of the character is dwarfed by the sudden loss of the actor. They do a good job honoring both. It also adds some subtext about the grieving process and how people move on. However this is also where the problems begin.

The original Black Panther wasn't a masterpiece of story telling or anything a lot of it's charm rested on Boseman who carried a big part of that movie. There really isn't anyone to take that role in the sequel. The try to make Shuri the new center piece and she was great in the original but it's almost too much to ask here and she's simply not Boseman and was more of a supporting character. That's what we are mainly left with here.. supporting characters trying to fill in but it doesn't work all that well. They also introduce Namor who is probably the best thing about this film and for whatever reason they shoehorn in Ironheart aka the 19 year old girl that's better in every way than tony stark.. she's as obnoxious as that sounds and mostly superfluous to the story beyond being a plot device early on.

The next big problem is the primary conflict between Wakanda and the Atlantians Underwater Mayans. Even if you aren't familiar with the comics you know Namor isn't totally evil he's more of an anti-hero. We end up with more of a Batman v. Superman scenario.. you know they are going to fight but you also know neither side is going to totally lose. It really sucks the power out of the conflict as you aren't really invested in either side destroying the other. Usually in these types of stories you have a 3rd true villain to make the finale work but that doesn't happen here.

The biggest problem with Black Panther 2 by far however is the bloated meandering script. You know how some movies feel about 20 minutes too long? Black Panther feels about an hour too long. Seriously every scene seems to take forever to get to where it's going. When you throw in the predictability of many of these sequences it becomes a slog. This was about a half-dozen rewrites away from being a filmable script but whatever let's go anyway.

Bottom line.. if you just need more Wakanda no matter what you'll get nearly 3 hours of it here. However this is another post-endgame Marvel movie that is pretty severely flawed. What happened to quality control? Can nobody proof read these scripts? Make no mistake there is a good movie buried somewhere in Black Panther 2 but it needed a lot tightening up to focus on the elements that worked instead of just vomiting out what made it to the screen. This movie feels like a directors workprint version versus a finished product. Unless they make some major changes I'm not coming back for Black Panther 3 but I'm down for a Namor movie.

It's a shame, another disappointing Marvel outing. They really better fast track Fantastic Four and the X-Men.

[k7]

marvel has spiderman, punisher, xmen, and some hulks. they're allowed a stinker, or in the case of the last 5 marvel movies...5 stinkers.

[Niloc]

I hope they can get Fantastic 4 working, but I kind of doubt it. The comics always felt a bit dated and corney to me as a kid - in the 80s when we were getting The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, F4 still felt like it was stuck in 1962.

They did get more interesting when they went down the path of Reed being kind of evil - it turns out he exposed them to "cosmic rays" on purpose, and Ben Grimm is not happy finding out about that.
Needs lots of setup though - would have to be at least the 3rd F4 movie.

X-Men on the other hand could be gangbusters. There are a ton of great stories that either haven't been touched (for a movie) yet, or could/should be re-done better (Phoenix).