Review of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) by Crowtheartist — 16 Nov 2022

With all due respect to the late Chadwick Boseman. Unfortunately, this movie does not quite land the “slam dunk” they should have had as a movie that pays those respects to him. Coogler had a choice to make: use the passing of Boseman and incorporate that into the story; or re cast the role (which is what Boseman himself would have wanted).

Doing the former risks not accomplishing entirely what you’re intending to, and again, unfortunately, that was the case with this movie. Imagine your brother dies, and a cousin of his knew that his favorite artist was Weird Al Yankovic.

So, this cousin gets Weird Al to play at the funeral – you’re running the risk that instead of it being a grand event, it’ll turn into a distasteful, cheap spectacle that doesn’t quite pay the respects that you wish it would.

This movie is not that extreme of a case, but it also needed a slam dunk, and it falls short. Coogler should have taken option 2, which was Boseman’s wish, and re cast Black Panther, and told a different story.

Instead, this movie suffers from trope after trope, and most disappointingly: “missed opportunities”. It is not the “beautiful story that one would hope from a movie like this. And there’s also lots of issues that make the movie seem heartless (no pun intended) and vicious.

Sure, we’ve seen some atrocities in this universe before, but this movie has no issue with killing a Police Officer, and there’s a lack of conscience in not highlighting it, as if it’s no big deal that a law enforcement person’s life was just ended.

In fact, to most people, they won’t bat an eyelash at it – and that’s a problem. Namor is the Highlight of the movie, and being the same thing as any other “this is our land, we will defend our people” type of character we’ve seen countless times before, he seems cold, and insensitive.

This turns him into the villain in the third act, which makes sense, but giving him redemption takes away that arc – like saying “You’re allowed to murder my mother, as long as you yield and do the right thing in the end.

” Sure, it gives Shuri a chance to be the right kind of Black Panther, with mercy and without killing, but it also questions why there’s no commitment to either making him a full hero-defending-his-people, or a heartless-cold-villain.

There’s no set pieces that blow you away, and there’s the same issues that, ironically, plagued the ending of the first Black Panther movie – over-reliance on CGI and green-screen obviousness. In the ending, where the movie was ALMOST going to point towards a “it was all a dream” kind of thing, I actually got excited to see that direction.

Maybe the whole second and third act was a hallucination from Shuri’s taking the new Black Panther purple magic liquid, and realizing in that hallucination that she was doing it for the wrong reasons, before changing her ways BEFORE she actually turned to the Black Panther – but no.

All the destruction and death happened, and everyone is expected to be ok with that. The worst part is all the missed opportunities and lack of stakes and grandeur. I never felt like I was wow’ed or about to be wow’ed.

All the “woke” stuff feels shoehorned in. And Iron Heart feels like she just doesn’t belong and is a third wheel to the whole thing. There’s almost no point to her being there, and she could easily be taken out of the movie – which is not really fair to the character, or the point of the character being in the MCU.

In the end, I was utterly underwhelmed, and wanting more, but in a different way. I found myself saying in my head “ugh…they could have done this differently” many times, throughout the movie. And the biggest offender is the highly anticipated “new Black Panther” reveal, which was supremely bland, unimaginative, anti-climactic, cheap, uninteresting.

This should have been the biggest moment in the movie, and it was far from it. The first Black Panther was underwhelming to me as well, but this movie had the expectation to be something special from paying respects to Chadwick Boseman.

Instead, it is a big disappointment from something that should have been a spectacular way of sending his memory off.