The new hero in town, yep another

Rating: 6/10 (20 February 2018)

"Black Panther" is a new American movie that makes it quite comfortably past the 2-hour mark and here we have the most recent addition to the Marvel universe as in the face of the topic of racism that is still oh so dominant (really more than it should be as we are living in very tolerant times) we get the first Black superhero movie in a long time. Ryan Coogler directs and he is also part of the writing squad. I would say that by including a main antagonist here that is also Black they took some racial tension out here, but if you look at the political history of America and the Black Panthers, it may not be the wisest move to go with this animal. Besides, I felt there was far from sufficient elaboration why they did. The dream sequence with the father being a panther now that he is dead alone wasn't enough for sure. Another slightly controversial decision that the main antagonist is an American megalomaniac was not the most sensitive either. But luckily, there are also enough positive things to mention here. Technically, the film is on a pretty high level in terms of sound and visual effects, there is no reason to say it isn't on par with other Marvel stuff from recent history. Also the film shows that you don't need characters from previous Marvel films to succeed the way they included Hulk most recently in Thor 3. And Boseman in the lead does a pretty good job like everybody else almost, certainly better than Cumberbatch for example. The one exception here is Kaluuya whose character did almost nothing for me and whose performance rang pretty false too on several occasions. The one who made up for that was Andy Serkis, who was great fun to watch and perhaps the best thing about the movie, one of not too many white performers here, who were mostly included for comedic (not entirely) situations. This description also fits Martin Freeman's role and he was the same as usual sadly, but luckily his material was good without being too challenging, so it worked. Not the Freeman you'd expect in this film though, is he?
From the Black cast, a special mention goes out to Winston Duke who was really hilarious and makes the most of the little (screen time) he was given here. His cannibalism/vegetarianism joke was perhaps the best (recurring) joke the entire film had to offer. Michael B. Jordan was a good main antagonist I think, even if he seemed a bit insignificant early on, but that's okay. He sure is no Andy Serkis. The film's weakest moment was the epilogue that we got here the way we got it in every Marvel movie where we have the King tell the press that his country will no longer ignore global conflicts and this went entirely against everything before that as one of the key messages here was that they do not want to be involved while the bad guy wants to use the country's ressources to dominate the world. It was simply wrong. Obviously this was done so that they could include Black Panther in other upcoming Marvel films like the next Avengers movie, but probably others as well. Very cheap and if that's one of the things you remember the most when leaving the theater, then that is almost a negative deal-breaker. But luckily most of what we saw earlier was good enough, especially the shots at comedy that never felt as wrong or try-hard as in an Iron Man film (sorry RDJ), for me to still recommend the watch here. There are nonetheless serious issues here like the way the protagonist recovers so unrealistically quickly after his defeat and honestly this really felt like taken from Batman's conflict with Bane and he cannot defeat the bad guy at the peak of his physical fitness before that, but then he wins afterward after being in a coma recently? Nah guys. The female amazon tribe story added nothing for me either. So overall, realism, authenticity and convincing character elaborations are an issue here and the final scene in America about that apartment felt really try-hard in making a political impact and the film is never as touching or politically relevant from the contemporary perspective as it wants to be, but it is like other recent Marvel films okay from the pointless fun perspective. I give it a thumbs-up. Worth checking out, but not a must-see by any means.