Black Panther Review

Article by Gabe Zia

Lazy Film Critic Movie Reviews

Black Panther

So after 10 years and 18 movies, Marvel seems to be on a solid winning streak with 3 pretty great movies in a row in 2017, and having just seen Black Panther I can confirm they can add a fourth movie to that streak of winners. While The Winter Soldier will always hold that golden spot for me as best of the franchise, Ryan Coogler has made one of the best and most competently made superhero movies in recent memory. While it may suffer from some of the usual problems that MCU movies have, it packs a story thats significantly darker and smarter than the typical superhero movie.

Part of what made The Winter Soldier the best MCU movie is how disconnected it felt from the superhero affair, and felt more like a Metal Gear Solid style espionage thriller. The best examples of the superhero genre are the movies where it feels more like an original story rather than a cookie cutter CGI big superhero fight movie. And where Winter Soldier is an espionage thriller or Ant-Man is a heist movie, Black Panther in both story and style plays more like a James Bond spy movie. Like a Bond movie, its story structure is less world ending galactic conflict and more hypothetical preventative, the big climax being centred around the prevention of what could lead to a world changing conflict rather than the world changing conflict itself. The restraint shown in containing the story to itself rather than making it as big and cosmically important as possible is pretty rare in this genre, and it works really well for this movie. 

While Civil War was on the whole kind of just okay, it did have one standout feature, Chadwick Bosemans scene stealing performance as Black Panther. One of my concerns though was a concern I have a lot of the time a scene stealing supporting character is used as a main character in a follow up. Part of what makes supporting characters great is how they play off the actual conflict of the main characters story, and can't work on their own with their own story. Luckily, this is not such a case, and Chadwick Bosemans performance as well as the character he plays works perfectly for a main character role. Michael B. Jordan is the best actor in this movie as the villain, usually MCU villains are pretty bad, even in the MCU movies I really like, but recently they've done a really great job with their villains. Much like Adrien Tombes this is a significantly more sympathetic and understandable villain than a generic bad guy who does things because he's bad. It's nice to see that recent Marvel movies at least try to make their villains compelling and have motives that we can believe and even to a certain extent understand where they're coming from. If the rule is that the best villains are ones with motivations that are believable and to a certain extent could be argued to carry more weight than the heroes motives than Killmonger definitely fits that description. 

Aside from villains though there is one other problem that for the longest time seemed to have the MCU in a chokehold, and that's tone. With some exceptions most Marvel movies seem to consistently have a problem with balancing how much of the movie they want to be taken seriously and how much they have to have fun with, and I'm not just talking about comic relief, I mean even in the ones I really like such as Spider-Man Homecoming this problem is relevant, scenes that seem to be very serious can be interrupted when the tone shifts suddenly to a more lighthearted comic book vibe, it's really annoying and I'm glad Black Panther is one of the few that doesn't have this issue. Despite still being a comic book movie for the most part it maintains a consistently serious tone, and even though it still has some out of place comedic moments it doesn't ruin the experience. But this comes with two drawbacks that were kind of annoying, mainly how the movie went about comic relief itself. While the serious moments and darker story work really well the humour feels really forced and most of the jokes whenever it tries to make one don't land. I know this movie isn't a comedy but the comedic moments in it really don't work. I'm not even kidding, there's a really cringey outdated meme reference in this movie, despite how much I was enjoying the movie aside from that.

Final Rating
It might have a fair amount of issues, personally I still loved Black Panther, it had some great action, it had great acting, it has one of the best stories in an MCU movie, and it has one of the most interesting main characters in the series. I'd love to see a sequel to this, and I'd definitely like to see where Wakanda and this story goes in Infinity War. Whether you're a fan of this series like I am or you're totally new, Black Panther is worth watching, so definitely check it out.