Critics reviews

As just another entry in the MCU, Wakanda Forever is a very solid film. Entertaining and intelligent, it builds on the themes of its predecessor. Yet, navigating more than defying the Marvel machine, Coogler’s sequel becomes more than the sum of its parts. And so Wakanda Forever’s most important legacy is as a fine and fitting tribute to its erstwhile hero.

[Black Panther] has sadly begat one of [Marvel's] drabbest, stalest, most incoherent sequels – a near-three-hour endurance run of gloomy photography and turgidly staged, emotionally empty two-way conversations, all seemingly designed to sap cast and viewers’ combined will to live.

Coogler’s film is certainly not without the occasional dodgy bit of CGI – that is a prerequisite for belonging to the MCU, it seems. But there’s more than enough wit, beauty and imagination in Wakanda Forever to outweigh its weaknesses.

The mere existence of a blockbuster built around Black women and a fantastical Mesoamerican culture is astounding, even if it shouldn't be. The interpersonal storylines, the tackling of the connections between grief and rage and flight, are some of the deepest and most nuanced in the franchise's history, as is the underlying narrative of two powerful nations heading to a needless conflict in the fog of war. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is at its best when it looks at confusion rather than adding to it.

Wakanda Forever is, ultimately, a weary drag. It is as if the James Bond franchise had gone straight from Dr No to Moonraker in one leap (but with fewer jokes)... One senses the filmmakers pausing and slowing down the fight sequences merely as a way of breaking up the tedium.

In Wakanda Forever, though Coogler doesn’t (and perhaps for contractual reasons can’t) reinvent the superhero system from the ground up, he does something both fascinating and long overdue: He spreads the usual singularity of the Marvel hero... across three or four different characters, all of them women. To a much greater degree than I would have thought possible, Wakanda Forever is a gajillion-dollar comic-book blockbuster about something as complex and interior as the act of female mourning,

Coogler admirably takes a big swing with Wakanda Forever and it produces a feature that is fluently in conversation with its predecessor, but less so with its position inside the wider franchise universe. There are some noticeable misses, but the value of such intricate and elevated storytelling cannot be discounted.

[Wakanda Forever is a] Marvel movie, for sure. But a pretty interesting one, partly because it’s also a Ryan Coogler film, with the director’s signature interplay of genre touchstones, vivid emotions (emphasized by Ludwig Goransson’s occasionally tooth-rattling score) and allegorical implications.

The strength of Coogler’s dramatic imagination is held back by a sense of franchise obligation... [The director] seems to be executing compulsory figures. The dramatic logic isn’t so much clear as it is transparent in its effortful connection of the far-flung and far-fetched action; the characters are chess pieces whose dramatic autonomy is sacrificed to the planned outcome... “Wakanda Forever” is overwhelmed by the call of duty.

To say the film is overtaxed is an understatement. Regrettably, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever tries to do so many things that it comes across as threadbare and pallid — less a failure of imagination and more of circumstance, time, and narrative constraints.

“Black Panther” existed just outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It mostly stood on its own without the crushing requirements felt by every other film... [But Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole] don't possess the same kind of freedom with this melancholy sequel. Some limitations aren't within their control, such as the tragic death of Boseman. Others feel like a capitulation to assimilate into a movie-making machine.

Wakanda Forever is grand, all right. Yet there’s not much Coogler, or anyone, can do about the gaping hole at its center: With no Chadwick Boseman, it’s missing a measure of magic, a sad reality that’s no one’s fault.