Not recasting T’Challa was the right decision, and this film is built around the hole that leaves rather than trying to fill it.
I enjoyed the first one and I enjoyed this too. It isn’t my favourite Marvel film, and it’s quite well done. Three and a half out of five. Sorry a bit of a mishmash of opinions and thoughts, but it will all make sense when you’ve read the rest!ugh
Leaving the role empty was brave
They could have recast. Plenty of people expected it, and there’s a version of this film where a new actor puts on the suit in the first twenty minutes and the franchise carries on.
Instead the film opens with T’Challa dying off-screen and spends its whole runtime on what that does to everyone left. Chadwick Boseman isn’t replaced, he’s absent, and the absence is the subject. That’s a real choice and it gives the film a weight most of these don’t have.
The funeral sequence is the best thing in it. No score for long stretches, a lot of white, a country processing a loss in public. It plays as genuine rather than as franchise machinery, which was not guaranteed.
Namor is a very good villain
I liked him a lot, and I liked how they introduced him.
He’s comic accurate in the way that matters: his war against the surface world isn’t a scheme, it’s a settled position he arrived at centuries ago and has never had cause to revise. The film gives him a proper history, a people worth protecting, and a completely coherent argument that the surface world will come for Talokan the moment it knows Talokan exists. He’s right about that. The film doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Tenoch Huerta plays him as somebody genuinely old, which is the hard part. He isn’t posturing. He’s just seen this before.
The sequence where his strength fails him once he’s kept out of the water makes sense as a mechanic and gives the third act a way to work. That part’s well handled.
The treaty is where it loses me
Here’s my main problem, and it’s a big one.
Namor and his people have killed a great many people over the years, much of it simply to keep their location hidden. That’s the film’s own account of things. Then the ending arrives at a peace, and everyone walks away.
Does any of that warrant being left alone? He’s not a misunderstood neighbour, he’s the head of a state that has been quietly drowning anyone who got too close for a very long time. The film wants a resolution where two grieving nations recognise each other, which is a lovely idea, and it gets there by not looking too hard at the body count.
That’s sub-par. Killmonger’s ending in the first film had the courage of its convictions. This one blinks.
Ramonda is the film’s centre
Angela Bassett is superb and she’s the reason the middle of the film holds together.
She makes complete sense as a queen who has lost a husband and a son and is now being circled by every power on Earth. The way she handles the UN, the way she handles Shuri, the way she goes after Riri because she’s decided the girl is under her protection. All of it is consistent and all of it is played at full weight.
Whatever else this film does, it gives her the best material she’s had here, and she takes it.
I’m not sure about Shuri
This is where I’m most hesitant.
Her real strength has always been her brains. She’s the one who builds things, solves things, out-thinks everyone in the room, and the first film used that brilliantly. Making her the Black Panther pushes her into being the brawn instead, and I don’t think that’s where the character is at her best.
Letitia Wright is okay in it. The grief material works. It’s the suit I’m unconvinced by, because it turns the most inventive person in Wakanda into someone who solves problems by punching.
I’d also have taken more of the first film’s villain than the single glimpse we get. There’s an interesting film in Shuri being genuinely tempted by that worldview, and it’s raised and dropped in one scene. A returning antagonist, or another claimant to the throne entirely, would have given her something to push against.
The third act
Not as strong as the first two. The film spends an hour and a half building two nations with real arguments and then resolves it with a fight on a boat.
That’s the usual complaint about these films and it applies here. The scale goes up, the specificity goes down, and the ending has to be a battle because the format says so.
Riri is a decent addition, though the film has more characters than it has room for. She works better as the reason the plot starts than as a participant in the ending.
Where it lands
Three and a half. Quite well done, genuinely moving in places, and let down by an ending that wants everyone to be reconcilable.
One thing I’m curious about. In the comics Namor has a whole history with Sue Storm and the Fantastic Four, and the MCU still hasn’t cast them. If that ever happens, this character suddenly has somewhere much more interesting to go, and his introduction here would look like groundwork. I’ve no idea whether that’s the plan.
Better than Love and Thunder by a distance, and a more serious film than most of what’s come out this year. It just doesn’t quite stick the landing.
