Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a Bloated Whale of A Mess

That Namor Rides In On

There used to be a time when a movie premiered, there was this special energy that emanated around it. The magic, the excitement, the actors who couldn’t wait to promote it, the audience who couldn’t wait to see it. In these past few years though, that has changed tremendously, and not for the better. In those years, there has been this infusion of hostility towards the fans, actors speaking out on justice propaganda, studios' preemptive attacks on the very demographic that fuel their coffers, and a general sense of malaise with the Hollywood industry. What we get to see with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is the contamination of all those ingredients. With a running time of 2 hours and 41 minutes, it’s a bloated mess. If you’re going to see it, I advise you to get a nap before you go in order to stay awake as you slog through this fiasco of a film. There is very little to write home about with this film. Its spirit is haunted by the ghost of the original Black Panther, Chadwick Boseman.

His death permeates through the entire film and they don’t let you forget that from start to finish. There has been a debate surrounding recasting the part of the Black Panther and by the looks of this film, they should have as this became a 2-and-a-half memorial wake. This film lulls you into complacency and if you’re not in a mental stupor, you’ll realize after I did after around the 1 hour 13-minute mark there was yet to see any form of a Black Panther which I’m now calling Blank Panther.

I was getting bored with the “feelings in hallways” of this film. After we are introduced to a funeral for T’Challa, the story is supposed to be a year after Blank Panther’s death. But everyone is still walking around on eggshells. When you look at it for a while, you feel as if those connected to Blank Panther need grief counseling with Dr. Phil to understand the root cause of this mindset. But at some point, you realize that there is supposed to be a story here.

In this iteration, we are introduced to two new characters. The first one calls himself Namor (pronounced No-more) but for those of us who are comic book fans, it’s pronounced Nay-mor. Some pencil neck dweeb decided to refer to Namor as No-more. I had issues with the Namor character and it stems from the comic book version. In the comic book version, Namor was lean and muscularly cut, You saw the definition in his torso, front, and back. The muscles in his legs were tight and bulging. In this film version, the Namor looked like he was three Whoppers away from having a beer belly. He was not cut and when he walked out of the waters on the shores of Wakanda, there were no back muscles. If he was a swimmer, there would have been back muscles like the Aquaman. This Namor is pudgy.

In the comic book version, Namor looked more Euro-Asian with his pale skin and Asian eyes. His ears were more Spock-like and he stood at least 6'-3”. In the film version, he’s a short Hispanic man with the Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power elf ears and he’s just shy of being called an elf. When you hear the powers that be discussing Namor, it was a purposeful decision to go in that direction, screw canon.

There was no logic to Namor and his tribe. The underwater scenes were illogical. I will speak to two of them. The first is the amount of clothing they wore underwater. Why were not they wearing clothing that wasn’t layered in fabric? Sure, the women can’t be nearly or partially naked but wearing togas under the sea is ridiculous. The people were also wearing ornate headgear and ornamental jewelry in battle. In the comic book, Namor wore no such ostentatious jewelry into battle. Did anyone say to the powers that be that this was just dumb?

The second character was Riri Williams, the genius prodigy whom Disney/Marvel is laying out as the new Iron-man. She is supposed to be 19 but she looks 25 so I looked her up and SHE IS 25. Most of her dialogue was painful and if she is supposed to be this genius, why does she speak with a vernacular from someone who went to school in Alabama? This is a trope Disney went down the road with again. We’re going to say that she’s a genius but she speaks ghetto.

Blank Panther is clearly a female-centric film. With the exception of pudgy Namor, there is very little interaction with men. Shuri is not a lead actress and she can’t carry the weight of this film for 2 hours and 41 minutes. I say this because I started to drift away from her at the 1 hour and 13-minute mark after realizing that there was no Blank Panther and the character was losing confidence in me. You stop being invested and you start thinking about when will all of this come to an end. The men are mostly relegated to reaction mode and Winston Duke as M’Baku, is just a limited action prop star. It’s about four steps down from his original role in the first film. Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger serves as a cleansing palate to wake up the audience after being lulled into submission by way too many exposition scenes.

When the Queen died, you felt nothing. The reaction of Shuri to Queen Ramonda was empty. There was no connection in the mother/daughter moment that should have been established in the first film but now it had to be hastily cobbled together with lackluster results.

Of the action scenes that were very little of for this two-hour and 41-minute movie, there was no excitement to them. Good action films put you in the middle of the action like a good Bruce Lee film where you mimic the punches thrown by Bruce as he connects to the target. The chase and bridge scenes were tepid. The battle scenes on the ship weren’t as memorable or even a water-cooler moment. When Shuri gets run through with a spear, we are supposed to suspend the belief that this was a kill shot. I remember seeing The Sixth Sense and when Bruce Willis is shot in the gut, I said to myself that that was a fateful shot and I was right. Growing up in a city of violence there are certain things that you learn and death, violent death became par for the course. Shuri took a spear to the stomach and was run through. The blade would have lacerated her stomach, her kidney, large intestines, and gall bladder and may have nicked her spine. The internal damage would have been massive and yet she pushes herself off the spear which would have caused her to bleed out but no, she finishes the fight with Namor because she’s a strong woman.

This is The Woman King 3. There were the all-women pallbearers, all-women fighters, the woman boss played by Julia Luis-Dreyfuss, and the woman over the underwater exploration team, all the women were tough with the exception of the scuba diver who screamed at the unknown. Pudgy Namor gets defeated and makes a truce. Shuri lets M’Buku fight for the throne without any explanation. Okoye breaks out Everett Ross from the back of a prison transport and calls him a colonizer which is the equivalent of calling him a slave master and he has no comeback for that insult because he’s a white man. Stand up for yourself, Ross. Shuri goes to Haiti where Lupita Nyongo’s Nakia is working and walks on the beach and begins to live in her memories reflecting on her life with T’challa. It started off as maudlin and it ended with maudlin.

The question most people would want to know in these times is, was the film woke? In a nutshell, yes. There was no strong-male lead. It had identity politics throughout. There was no discussion of any romantic love interest, not even when Kakia was reminiscing about her life with T’Challa. I was expecting more, something deeper but I got little service.

I don’t know if they did Chadwick Boseman any favors with this rendition of Blank Panther. Only historians will look back on it and make that assessment. The only thing this version of Blank Panther did was for it to live under the shadow of Chadwick Boseman for eternity. For now and what was presented, it’s a no for me. Two out of five stars.