#55: BLACK PANTHER: WANKAS FOREVER

 

Starring: Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong'o, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Florence Kasumba, Dominique Thoren, Michaela Coel, Tenoch Huerta, Marting Freeman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Angela Bassett. Written by Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole. Directed by Ryan Coogler. Running time ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY ONE MINUTES! Budget $250 million dollars. 

T'Challa, King of Wakanda is dead and the 'erb that gave him his superhuman power is gone, the super-secret nation state of Wakanda is in mourning and the world wants its' hands on the Vibranium. Luckily a new source of it is discovered at the bottom of the sea. Unluckily, there's this mutant called Namor who uses it to power his super-secret underwater nationstate of Talokan and he doesn't want the upstairs people (us) to have it.

Gotta say, right off the bat that if these two incredibly selfish and greedy super-secret nation states shared the vibranium with the rest of the world, then we'd all be living in an utopia, but oh no. These two wanka nations just want it for themselves. Hence the subtitle of this movie. Wankas Forever. Greedy bastards. 

Anyway, when Namor finds out a young, sassy, wise-ass-talking teenage girl from up there (us) has built  device to find vibranium and located his source of totally unguarded Vibranium just lying about in the open, at the bottom of the sea, he throws a hissy fit and threatens to kill everybody in Wanka unless they bring the girl to him. 

Queue a long and rather tedious adventure that sees people abducted to propel the plot, repeatedly, that's when they're not acting like arseholes to each other, which is all of the time, or spending an insane amount of time just moping about talking about their feelings, and dealing with grief for about ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY MINUTES, leaving just 30 minutes for any, you know, action. And when after about ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY MINUTES Black Panther 2 finally turns up for the big old fight with Namor, you sort of wave your hands in a hooray kind of way. Shame it's not really worth waiting for. The fight has no stakes, no drama and no tension, just you know bloodless stabbing and slashing with knives, swords and spears, but at least there's no spinning vortex of doom, and the fights take place in broad day light.

Also, for a race apparently insanely smart, the Wankandas sure are idiots when it comes to military strategy. I mean, seriously? You're going to attack a race of underwater people from a really large boat in the middle of the ocean, where the race of underwater people get their power from, you know water. The blue stuff that covers the Earth and where Namor's bunch of grumps live. Yeah, smart move brainiacs. Why not lure them on land. 

Most of the film, I'd say a good 95% of its running time is spent waiting for Letitia Wright put on the new Black Panther suit and when it finally happens you're sort of left deeply underwhelmed by it. I wish these movies would lose the trope of having heroes not wanting to put on the mask. It's been done to death. 

However before then there's lots of earnest discussions about honour, responsibility, grief, family, and oodles of emotion, which really helps to fill out the ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY ONE MINUTES.

I find the whole idea behind Wanka really annoying. What a selfish bunch of tossers, hiding away from the world and acting like their shit don't stink. The Western world are presented here as a useless bunch of greedy tossers and only the Wankas and Tapioca people are worthy of respect or our time.

And yet another MCU superhero movie where none of the other heroes are featured or mentioned, nor is the dead Eternal sticking out of the Earth is talked about. Added to that is yet another genius tech wizard creating Iron Man suits from literal balls of string and sticky back plastic and you have a Marvel cash-cow movie just created to suck as much filthy lucre from a gullible audience as it can.

I found the whole film dull and tedious to be honest. Doubt I'll ever watch it again. Nothing worth going back for. But it's not all bad news, at least it's not as bad or dull as The Eternals, but it's pretty damn close race. 

Not as bad as a DCU movie or Morbius, or Venom, although this is still a rather dull, boring and dreary plod of a movie and it does elevate mopping to truly gargantuan  proportions. A film more interested in lionising, nay deifying Chadwick Boseman than in actually having an interesting or exciting story to tell.  6/10