MATTHEW BOND Angela’s a Marvel – but this is a bit of a slack Panther
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
Cert: 12A, 2hrs 41mins
★★★★★ Spirited
Cert: 12A, 2hrs 7mins
Also on Apple TV+ from Friday
★★★★★ Slumberland
Cert: PG, 1hr 57mins
Also on Netflix from Friday
★★★★★
The Swimmers
Cert: 15, 2hrs 14mins
Also on Netflix from November 23
★★★★★
The Black Panther franchise wastes no time in addressing the tragic loss of its former star, Chadwick Boseman, who died from cancer in 2020, less than three years after the release of the highly acclaimed original.
The new film, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, opens with the death of the character he played, King T’Challa, and continues with T’Challa’s state funeral attended by thousands of mourners all dressed in white.
Both sequences are well staged by returning director, Ryan Coogler, and modestly moving too. But neither quite has the emotional impact of the simple still photographs of Boseman that fold into the word ‘Marvel’ as the film’s opening titles finally begin.
That sets the pattern for what ensues. Where the original burned with a righteous anger, its sequel is inescapably suffused with a sense of absence and loss. Combine that with a bloated running time and too much responsibility falling on the shoulders of Letitia Wright, returning as T’Challa’s tech-minded sister, Shuri, and you begin to see why, at times, Wakanda Forever feels like it really might be forever.
Of course, there are compensations: Marvel and its Disney parent have been doing this too long for there not to be. Angela Bassett is nomination-grabbingly good as Queen Ramonda, even if her thunder – and, to some extent, the film’s – has been stolen by Viola
Davis and The Woman King. To have two similarly structured films, both set in Africa and led by strong, black female casts, released within six weeks of each other… let’s just say it’s unfortunate. Lupita Nyong’o as T’Challa’s former love interest, Nakia, and Danai Gurira, as the fearsome Okoye, also stand out. But with the Mexican actor Tenoch Huerta a tad underpowered as the leader of the under water dwelling Talokanil, this is a sequel that never scales the heights of the original, despite the hard work obviously put in by its vast visual-effects team.
By and large, I don’t approve of watching Christmas films before December but I’m going to make an exception for Spirited, which is getting a limited cinema release before moving to Apple TV+.
Becoming the umpteenth film to be loosely based on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, this Yuletide musical is a little piece of foot-tapping seasonal joy. You’ll come out wanting to see Ryan Reynolds sing Good Afternoon with the worst cockney accent since Dick Van Dyke again and again and again.
Will Ferrell plays the Ghost of Christmas Present who, along with his colleagues, Christmas Past and Christmas Yet To Come, gets to save one old misery-guts a year by showing them the errors of their past, present and future.
But when Present selects a particularly obnoxious media consultant, he may have bitten off more than the team can collectively chew. Clint Briggs (Reynolds) has been branded ‘unredeemable’ by the afterlife powers-that-be.
Ferrell and Reynolds are terrific, the big song-and-dance numbers even better, and do look out for a wonderfully silly cameo from Judi Dench. It would be getting the full five stars but for one jarring lapse of taste and the ungallant story treatment meted out to the glamorous ghost of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani), who begins brightly, only to disappear for most of the film.
Marlow Barkley plays Clint’s orphaned niece in Spirited and she plays the very similar role of Nemo in Slumberland, which sees her devoted lighthouse-keeper father being lost at sea and Nemo dispatched to her dull, doorknob-selling, child-avoiding uncle in the city (Chris O’Dowd). Thank goodness she can lose herself, and possibly find her father, in her dreams…
It looks great and Barkley and O’Dowd are terrific, although Jason Momoa underwhelms as Flip, a derivative-feeling force of chaos who starts to haunt those dreams.
Anyone who feels they’ve got their views on Europe’s refugee crisis firmly nailed down might find those views challenged by The Swimmers, which tells the story of two teenage sisters who flee wartorn Syria for Europe, determined not to give up on their dream of swimming at the Olympics. It’s way too long but inspirational, shocking and thoroughly moving.