Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’ on Disney+, a Messy, But Worthy Tribute to the Late Chadwick Boseman

Marvel pays tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (now on Disney+). But it can’t just be a heartrending remembrance of a gifted actor who played a key character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because, well, this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and nothing is simple. Movies can’t just be movies, they have to be about 100 other things, a few of them being: The final outing in the MCU’s Phase Four, which consists of eight TV series, seven movies and a Christmas special. A bridge to the upcoming Ironheart series. An introduction for a new character with potential implications for Phase Five. One of few remaining saviors for the theatrical moviegoing experience (it grossed $842 million worldwide). Etc. Black Panther director Ryan Coogler returns alongside significant swaths of that movie’s cast (most notably Angela Bassett, who earned an Oscar nom and Golden Globe win for best supporting actress) to tackle a significant challenge: How do you make a Black Panther movie without Black Panther? The answer is, of course, very carefully.

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Shuri (Letitia Wright), Princess of Wakanda, sister of T’Challa/Black Panther, gifted scientist, strong human being in body and mind, is helpless. Her brother is dying and there’s nothing she can do about it and now so so suddenly, he’s gone. Shuri, her mother, Queen Mother Ramonda (Bassett), and warrior General Okoye (Danai Gurira) now bear the burdens of significant grief and leadership of Wakanda. A year later, the plot begins: The United Nations pressure Ramonda to share vibranium with the rest of the planet’s powers – you remember vibranium, right? Strongest metal on Earth, always and forever controlled by the benevolent Wakandans, used to make Captain America’s shield and Black Panther’s suit, and all that. Meanwhile, Americans use a vibranium detector on the Atlantic Ocean floor, hoping to get their grubby capitalist political-superpower hands on the valuable material, but they get the snot murdered out of them by blue-skinned underwater people who look like the Na’vi crossed with Aquaman’s pals. 

The blue people are led by a non-blue guy named Namor (Tenoch Huerta), a centuries-old superhuman warrior with Spock ears and feathery wings on his ankles. These water-breathing folk hail from the submerged metropolis of Talokan, which is also rich with vibranium, so, so much for Wakanda’s stranglehold on the resource, and the nation’s status as the planet’s superest political superpower. Namor even shows up in Wakanda to levy threats at Ramonda  and Shuri: Find the inventor of the vibranium detector or he’ll show up with his very very very big army, which is bigger than Wakanda’s merely very very big army. So Shuri and Okoye visit MIT to round up gifted genius student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), who not only created the detector, but also has a quasi-Iron Man suit, and a muscle car, and a motocross bike, all of which come in handy for the action sequence that immediately follows, and surely the half-dozen or so episodes of <em>Ironheart</em> that’ll follow a little further down the 2023 calendar.

So you can see the plot gears clicking into place here: A still-grieving Wakanda threatened by a potentially superior foe, and an existential quandary at the nation’s most powerful leadership position. Seems like a lean and mean and compelling conflict, but this being an MCU movie promising 141 minutes of bloat, it needs to be cluttered with other stuff, including: The return of CIA Agent Ross (Martin Freeman), who’s Wakanda’s man on the inside, and snarky CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus); and hey guess what, they used to bang, under the umbrella of their now-defunct holy matrimony. We also get a lengthy Namor origin flashback; a reintroduction to M’Baku (Winston Duke), head of Wakandan splinter tribe the Jabari; and the welcome return of Lupita Nyong’o’s character, Nakia, who’s been living in Haiti since Thanos so famously snapped his fingers. The common thread weaved through all of this stuff? Someone’s gotta take the helm, baby.   

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Wakanda Forever answers the burning question: What if Black Panther was more like Aquaman?

While we’re here, and since all MCU movies remind us of every other MCU movie, let’s rank the Phase Four movies:

7. Eternals

6. Thor: Love and Thunder

5. Black Widow

4. Wakanda Forever

3. Spider-Man: No Way Home

2. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

1. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Performance Worth Watching: Bassett’s Oscar nod is well-deserved, stemming from two or three passionate speeches, one of which actually stands out among all the too much stuff of this movie. Without her – and to a slightly lesser extent, Wright – the grief-and-mourning content that gives the movie its emotional heft wouldn’t be as potent.

Memorable Dialogue: A zinger gets dropped in the middle of explaining things, a phenomena I like to call comexposition:

Okoye: The great mound? All of the legends and fables? Those stories are seared into my mind.

Shuri: Sounds very painful.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Wakanda Forever is as watchable and wearisome as any MCU feature, but at least it’s weighed down ever so slightly more by visionary ambitions than by franchise obligations. Its greatest asset is its cast, with Wright, Bassett, Nyong’o and Gurira ably and charismatically divvying up the weight of Boseman’s absence, and emerging with something arguably greater: a quartet of Black women showing muscle, intelligence and emotional viability at the heart of a megablockbuster superhero film. Also intriguing is how Coogler and co-scripter Joe Robert Cole reinvent the Namor character from a son of Atlantis, as he was in the comics, to the successor of Mayan culture; such diversity gives the film opportunity for further representation and fresh visual invention (although the core idea of two nations of color warring each other doesn’t get much traction). 

Coogler continues to rebel against some of the visually washy components of the MCU, maintaining his status as an artist with an eye for thoughtful compositions. When he can, at least – he’s saddled with a need to fulfill franchise continuity (the Riri Williams subplot feels like a tacked-on afterthought; the Freeman/Louis-Dreyfus fodder goes nowhere) and structural formula. But at least where most Marvel films seem to have [insert complex final battle sequence here] on the screenplay’s final pages, his specific complex final battle sequences feature the occasional instance of striking imagery.

Although Coogler’s aesthetic virtuosity renders the film at least worth watching, one gets the sense that he’s struggling to control a gargantuan vessel. The general too-muchness of Wakanda Forever even transcends typical criticism – it’s hard to say one act or the other is more burdensome when they’re all poorly paced storytelling jalopies in need of substantial editorial streamlining. Add to this the general goofiness of Namor, who, despite Huerta’s considerable command presence, is tough to take seriously as a villain, since he’s essentially Aquaman but with tiny angel wings on his ankles. (Some will more easily overcome this hurdle; I was too busy rolling my eyes to attempt the jump.) 

Somewhere in this by-turns tedious and compelling mess is a tragedy. Boseman and the iconic character he played are no more. Sure, as empathetic humans, we feel the loss. The tribute here is heartfelt, but the spirit of the man and the character sometimes get lost in all the bric-a-brac of the Marvel machine. Inevitably, and predictably, the film lands on a triumphant note of succession, as it must – the gods inside and above the narrative demand it. Life must go on; there’s always darkness before the dawn – you know the truisms. But as the credits roll on Wakanda Forever, there’s a nagging sense that we should be more exhilarated and deeply moved by what just transpired, that the film’s reach exceeded its grasp and its catharsis was compromised. Instead, we feel like we’ve worked through something merely to get to a conclusion.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Despite the feeling that Wakanda Forever isn’t as good as it could’ve been, it’s still a medium-worthy Marvel adventure.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.