Black Panther: Wakanda Forever — Sophomore slump

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) • View trailer

3.5 stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, strong violence and occasional profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.11.22

If this new entry falls short of its predecessor, it’s mostly because the 2018 film set the bar so impressively high.

 

Okoye (Danai Gurira, left) and Shuri (Letitia Wright) adopt disguises in an effort to
infiltrate MIT, where they hope to locate — and rescue — the scientist who has
developed a controversial vibranium detector.

That said, director Ryan Coogler’s second entry in the Black Panther series has a massive hole in its center: the tragic absence of star Chadwick Boseman. Try as they might, Coogler and co-scripter Joe Robert Cole — both of whom brought us the first film — can’t quite fill that gap.

And, in an effort to compensate — while also honoring the series’ ongoing heritage — they spend too much time on grief, lamentation and bleak dialogue exchanges between the story’s primary characters. You’ll find very few smiles in this long-winded saga, which at a ridiculously self-indulgent 161 minutes, overstays its welcome by at least one massive melee too many.

 

On top of which, this story’s central character — the science-minded prodigy, Shuri (Letitia Wright) — is burdened by an unnecessary amount of heartbreak.

 

A year has passed since the untimely death of Shuri’s older brother, King T’Challa, from circumstances left vague. Wakanda’s Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) struggles to protect their nation from intervening world powers, some of whom — notably France and the United States — wish to get their hands on the African realm’s fabled vibranium metal, with its extraordinary abilities to absorb, store and release large amounts of kinetic energy.

 

This meteoric substance also remains invisible to conventional scanners, making it a potential game-changer in global rivalries … which Queen Ramonda knows only too well. She has no intention of sharing vibranium with anybody.

 

Ah, but elsewhere at sea, a U.S. research facility is monitoring the progress of a deep-water machine that CAN detect — and has found — an undersea vibranium deposit. But before this discovery can be celebrated, everybody at the facility is slaughtered by an ocean-going platoon of blue-skinned underwater denizens, led by the remorselessly vicious Namor (Tenoch Huerta), lord of the hidden undersea civilization of Talokan.

 

(A brief sidebar, for those unfamiliar with Marvel Comics history: Namor, most famously known as the Sub-Mariner, dates all the way back to 1939. Since then, he has become both hero and villain, generally in service of trying to prevent his undersea kingdom of Atlantis from being discovered and/or destroyed by “surface dwellers.” 

 

(More recently in the Marvel Comics universe — given that both are hidden civilizations with advanced tech and militaristic tendencies — Wakanda and Atlantis have been embroiled in a punishing, long-term war that has wreaked havoc on both sides: hence, this film’s core plotline.)

 

(But I’ve no idea while Coogler and Cole made up “Talokan,” when they could — should — simply have used Atlantis.)

The 33: Buried beneath clichés

The 33 (2015) • View trailer 
Three stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.13.15

The 2010 Copiapó mining accident, which trapped 33 men 2,300 feet underground after a catastrophic collapse within the 121-year-old copper-gold mine, is the stuff of legend: a tribute to heroism and indomitable human spirit, and a reminder that we are, indeed, capable of selflessly pulling together at times of extreme crisis.

As all of his fellow workers watch closely, Mario (Antonio Banderas, center) carefully
measures equal portions of their meager food supplies into 33 cups: the once-daily meal
that must sustain them all for as long as possible, while — they hope — rescue operations
proceed above ground.

It’s an incredible story, both in terms of what the men endured throughout their 69 days of captivity, and because of what took place on the surface, during what blossomed into an unprecedented world-wide effort to save them.

Sadly, director Patricia Riggen and her four (!) screenwriters fail to capture much of that drama in their oddly uninvolving film. Although their adaptation is based on Deep Down Dark — the best-selling account of the ordeal by Héctor Tobar, the only journalist granted access to the men and their families — this film is oddly shallow.

Despite a 127-minute running time, and some strong actors, we learn very little about most of these people; similarly, key details involving the above-ground rescue efforts are glossed over or omitted entirely.

Mostly, though, the film’s often larkish tone is simply wrong. Granted, tension can be maximized by occasional dollops of levity, but that’s a delicate balance, and Riggen makes hash of that recipe. Matters aren’t helped by an overly cheerful score from the late James Horner: a series of frivolous melodies that sound like the sort of hackneyed stuff that accompanied “south of the border sequences” in 1960s TV shows.

As the final score Horner completed before his untimely death in June, it’s an unfortunate postscript to an otherwise exemplary cinema legacy: This music too often trivializes these events.

We meet some of the primary characters during a typically jovial gathering, most of the miners and their families having bonded through their shared knowledge of this dangerous work. Mario Sepúlveda (Antonio Banderas) is the respected family man, with a doting wife and teenage daughter; Álex Vega (Mario Casas), a skilled young mechanic, chooses to work the mine because the pay is better, and thus offers greater promise to the life he wishes to build with his pregnant wife, Jessica (Cote de Pablo).

Luis “Don Lucho” Urzua (Lou Diamond Phillips), the shift supervisor, has long waged bitter arguments with mining company managers who ignore mounting evidence of the mine’s growing instability. Edison Peña (Jacob Vargas) is the token goofball and wannabe Elvis impersonator; Yonni Barrios (Oscar Nuñez) blatantly juggles a wife (Adrianna Barazza) and mistress (Elizabeth de Rasso) who live within shouting distance of each other.