Category Archives: Now Showing

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BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER

Producers: Kevin Feige and Nate Moore   Director: Ryan Coogler   Screenplay: Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole   Cast: Letitia Wright, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Winston Duke, Angela Bassett, Tenoch Huerta Mejia, Martin Freeman, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Dominique Thorne, Florence Kasumba, Michaela Coel, Alex Livinalli, Mabel Cadena, Isaach De Bankolé, Danny Sapani, Dorothy Steel, Zainab Jah, Richard Schiff and Gigi Bermingham   Distributor: Walt Disney Pictures

Grade: C+

Ryan Coogler had a couple of major objectives in crafting, along with his co-writer Joe Robert Cole, a sequel to the 2018 smash “Black Panther.”  One was paying proper tribute to Chadwick Boseman, the extraordinary young actor who played the title character, and whose untimely death cast a pall over the very idea of continuing the series.  The second was fashioning a rousing adventure movie in the Marvel mode.  With “Wakanda Forever” he’s succeeded better in achieving the first goal than the second.

The film opens with the Marvel logo transformed with images of Boseman as T’Challa, the Black Panther, and the entire first sequence is devoted to an elaborate funeral service for the recently-deceased, deeply mourned king; the grief it expresses, despite the festive street carnival that’s part of the ritual, feels as much for Boseman as for the character he played.  The pain of the loss suffuses everything that follows, and at the end the celebration of the actor/hero’s life is taken up pictorially once again.  Even the sole added scene in the closing credits is a revelation of a hitherto unknown aspect of T’Challa’s legacy.

Within this simultaneously mournful and laudatory remembrance of T’Challa and Boseman, new dangers erupt for Wakanda with its protector now gone.  They revolve, of course around vibranium, the metal that is the source of the country’s power.  Other nations are seeking it, sometimes employing violent methods.  T’Challa’s mother Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), who has assumed the rule, is confronted by an attempt, apparently by the United States and France, to take over a Wakandan “outreach center” in Mali to gain access to the treasure.  The effort is foiled by Okoye (Danai Gurira), the redoubtable head of Wakanda’s all-female security detail, and Ramonda confronts those countries’ representatives at the United Nations (Richard Schiff and Gigi Bermingham) to imperiously warn them that such efforts against her nation’s interests will be dealt with forcefully.

But the outside world’s lust for vibranium extends beyond Wakanda.  A vibranium detector fashioned by Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), a brilliant young science student at MIT, indicates a deposit of it In the ocean depths, and an American expedition under the direction of yet another noted scientist (Lake Bell) is out to find and extract it.  Unfortunately it serves as the power source for the underwater realm of Talokan, a descendant of the Mayan Empire inhabited by greenish-bluish folk who might have migrated from Pandora.  Their leader Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejia), with pointy ears and winged feet, also seen as the ancient feathered serpent god K’uk’ulkan, orders his army of soldiers and sirens to attack the interloper rig, which they do most effectively.

But Namor, the so-called Sub-Mariner of the Marvel comics stable, knows that efforts to subvert his realm are unlikely to cease.  So he travels to Wakanda, popping up from a lake to propose to the grieving Ramonda and her science-minded daughter Shuri (Letitia Wright) that Wakanda and Talokan join forces to eliminate the nations that endanger both realms.  His destructive, antiheroic proposal has some justification: as a youth back in the sixteenth century (played by Manuel Chavez), he watched the brutality inflicted on the indigenous peoples, including his own human mother (Irma-Estel Laguerre), by the imperialist Spaniards, and knows what such conquerors are capable of.  But Ramonda and Shuri reject such a plan, especially since Namor couples it with a threat against their nation should they turn down his proposed alliance.

What follows is an elaborate combination of political, military and personal drama.  Shuri and Okoye travel to Boston to recruit (some might say kidnap) Riri and bring her to Wakanda.  There they encounter their old friend, CIA agent Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), using him to get information about American intentions, which causes him to fall afoul of the agency’s director, his ex-wife (Julia Louis-Dreyfus).  They also call back to Wakanda T’Challa’s onetime lover Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), one of the Wakandan intelligence agents (or War Dogs), who has been living at an orphanage-school in an improbably idyllic Haiti.  And there are scads of additional Wakandan and Talokan figures—warriors and civilians—who are fitted into the scenario, many of whom are (or will now become) part of the gallery of characters memorized by extreme MCU fans.  Among those who are most notable are gruff M’Baku (Winston Duke), the audience-pleasing leader of the Jabari tribe whose bellicosity often takes a humorous turn, and Aneka (Michaela Coel), a Wakandan warrior with a special link to Okoye.

The thrust of the plot, however, becomes the conflict between Talokan and Wakanda: the underwater realm attacks with what appears to be a tidal wave, while the Wakandans return fire from a huge airship on which are heroic figures with powers and special suits contrived by Shuri and Riri.  (Without revealing too much, can you say Black Pantheress?)  The battle scenes are spectacularly mounted, but repetitive and prolonged, stretching the film to a running-time pushing well past two-and-a-half hours.  Of course, in the end it all comes down to one-on-one combat between Namor and a Wakandan whose identity will not be revealed here.

As with all of the MCU pictures, “Wakanda Forever” is efficiently manufactured from a technical perspective, with Hannah Beachler’s production design, Ruth Carter’s costumes and Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography all impressive, especially in the sequences set in Talokan, which have a magical shimmering tone.  The visual effects, supervised by Geoffrey Baumann and produced by Nicole Rowley respectively, are state-of-the art, and the music score by Ludwig Göransson employs African motifs to excellent effect.  One could ask for a tauter approach in the editing by Michael P. Shawver, Kelley Dixon and Jennifer Lame, but we seem to have gotten to the point where MCU devotees expect a lot of bloat and might feel cheated if they were handed a trim two-hour movie.

Within the limits of the genre, the acting is fine across the board, with some contributions that are exceptional.  Bassett gives Ramonda truly regal intensity, and Huerta is an imposing presence as the good-bad Namor.  Nyong’o and Gurira repeat their reliable work from the previous film, as does Duke.  But it’s Wright who makes the greatest impression as the royal sister torn between a desire to follow in the footsteps of her deceased brother or, perhaps, turn to a Wakandan dark side, represented by an superstar from the first film making an uncredited cameo appearance.  If there’s a weakness here, it’s Thorne, not in terms of the actress, who’s fine, but the role, which seems largely extraneous, a means of pandering to the youth audience.  (The emphasis on her car is especially irritating.)

“Wakanda Forever” can be admired for its ambition, but it’s grindingly melancholy, with no sense of joy: the crushing mood of grief, as well as the emphasis on pointless, murderous conflict, make it difficult to enjoy on an elemental superhero level.  That it will be a huge success financially goes without saying; but one suspects in coming years it will be recalled with respect rather than affection, especially in comparison to its predecessor. 

Now Showing

A MAN CALLED OVE (EN MAN SOM HETER OVE)

Grade: B-

There’s a bit of a “Forest Gump” vibe to “A Man Called Ove,” a Swedish comedy-drama that ultimately aims for the heartstrings more than the funny bone. Mostly genial, but with a heavy dose of pathos, Hannes Holm’s adaptation of Fredrik Backman’s novel gets its share of laughs, but as it proceeds opts more for sighs of contentment and a few tears.

Ove (Rolf Lassgard) is a grieving widower who also happens to be resident nag of his little neighborhood, prowling the streets daily to remove improperly parked bikes, harangue folks with pets they don’t control and prohibit people from driving in the streets. Those were rules he made in concert with his long-time friend Rune (Borje Lundberg) when Ove was head of the neighborhood board, and he continues to enforce them even after he’s been ousted from the post by Rune, with whom he’d had a falling-out over the relative virtues of Saabs and Volvos. Their animosity continues even though Rune has been incapacitated with a stroke and his wife Anita (Chartarina Larsson) is struggling to keep him at home rather than seeing him hauled off to a public facility. To add to his problems, Ove has just been unceremoniously fired from his job of more than forty years.

All of Ove’s frustrations are soon to end, however, because he intends to commit suicide and join his wife, who though wheelchair-bound was a beloved teacher of disadvantaged youth. But though he’s handy in every other respect, Ove proves terrible at killing himself: all his attempts either fail or are inconveniently interrupted, mostly by the noisy neighbors who have just moved in across the road—talkative, intrusive, pregnant Parvaneh (Bahar Pars), her inept husband Patrik (Tobias Almborg), and their two young daughters (Nelly Jamarani and Zozan Akgun).

Much of the film has to do with Ove’s developing relationship with this family: they’ll borrow tools from him (that they’ll then induce him to use for them), and Parvaneh will reciprocate with home-made food. She’ll also ask him to give her driving lessons—something that eventually leads him to share some memories of years past with her.

Before the film is over, moreover, Ove will mellow in other ways. He’ll adopt a stray cat he’d previously shooed away from his backyard, and grow extraordinarily protective of it. He’ll not only become friendly toward a boy—one of his wife’s former students—whose bike he’d previously commandeered, but take in one of his friends, a young gay man who’d been thrown out of his house by his father. And he’ll come to the aid of Rune and Anita as well.

But Ove’s present-day story is only the beginning. Episodes in it—especially his suicide attempts—lead to frequent flashbacks about his youth, in which he’s played by Viktor Baagoe, detailing his relationship with his father (Stefan Godicke), and about his experiences as a young man (Filip Berg), in which we learn of his courtship of the lovely Sonja (Ida Engvoll) and his blissful life with her, even if it was occasionally touched by loss. The flashbacks make clear the ups and downs of Ove’s fifty-nine years, as well as a couple of incidents in which he acts heroically, though adamantly refusing any public recognition of his courage.

The early portions of “My Name of Ove,” in which the fellow is a cantankerous grouch, are easily the most amusing parts of the picture. Lassgard brings a gleeful acerbity to scenes in which Ove refuses to suffer those whom he considers fools gladly, and walks a fine line between tragedy and farce in playing his suicide attempts. But as Ove’s crusty exterior gradually thaws, the picture becomes less comic and much sappier. Pars’s insistent matter-of-factness makes the transition more palatable, but even she has difficulty coping with scenes like a hospital visit in which Ove and the children are thrown together and become pals despite the intervention of a troublesome volunteer dressed in clown garb. By the close, Ove has become a thoroughly benign, grandfatherly soul, a modern Scrooge or Grinch turned to kindness by simply reconnecting with people.

That’s the moral of the picture, of course—the idea that no man is an island. It’s a well-worn message delivered a mite too comfortably to make the picture anything more than a moderately engaging but extremely manipulative crowd-pleaser that starts off quirky but grows increasingly cloying. It looks very fine—Jan Olof’s production design, Camilla Lindblom’s costumes and Goran Hallberg’s cinematography work together to effect a creamy surface, especially in the flashbacks, though the score by Gaute Storaas can be awfully obvious at times.

By any objective standard “My Name is Ove” is an overly calculated mixture of comic whimsy and tearjerking sentiment. But like a piece of candy with a sour exterior and a sweet center, it’s a confection that many viewers will find agreeable.