Director: Ryan Coogler
Cast: Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Guria, Danai Guria, Angela Bassett
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Feel weirdly guilty coming to it so late, but holiday movies are a weird feast or famine schedule for me.
Did I Like It: It’s astonishingly difficult to make a good movie.
Things don’t get any easier when you’re trying to make a movie in the studio system, to say nothing of the largest and still growing studio conglomerate on earth.
It’s even more bordering on the improbable that someone can make a good movie out of a sequel (to say nothing of the thirtieth entry in a larger franchise).
Can a person possibly make a good movie when all of those things are swirling around him, and the star of his franchise died?
Apparently Ryan Coogler can*. Filled with all-time great performance on top of all-time great performance, and held together with a plot which actually holds up under it’s run time (for the most part; I’ll get to that in a minute), and enough spectacle to make me somehow less interested in what Avatar: The Way of Water has to offer (and completely disinterested in anything Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, should that film ever see the light of day). I’m almost tempted to give the film a pass on my usual criticism of most films, in that every film needs more Lupita Nyong’o*. The amount of Nakia we do get in the film is still time well spent.
Is the film too long? Almost certainly, and that is the only problem I have with the whole thing. Honestly, find a different way to introduce a few (hardly load-bearing) pieces of exposition, and Martin Freeman lifts right out of the movie. Right along with him you can remove Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and for that matter (and it pains me to say so) Richard Schiff. All of those scenes seem unenthusiastically interested in setting up more of the Dark Avengers stuff that was started in Disney+’s series, Falcon and the Winter Soldier. I know, I know… A Marvel movie is weighed down by the strange need to set up other films. I was surprised, too.
*Sorry, J.J. Abrams. I’m sure you have many other fine qualities.
**Except Us (2019). That one has precisely the correct amount of Nyong’o. Just barely…