 The first Black Panther was a cultural phenomenon that not only grossed a ton of money, but stood out from the rest of the MCU offerings. It had its own identity. Ryan Cougar wrote and directed the first one, and he's back again for Wakanda Forever. I'm here to tell you my thoughts about it. You might not be happy. Let's get started. Here's the deal. You might not agree with my opinion. Oftentimes my subscribers don't, but I'm honest and genuine with them. I'm true to myself, and I think people appreciate that. When it comes to Wakanda Forever, I just didn't like it at all. And that's the honest to God's truth. I'm sorry if that offends you somehow. It's just not good. And I like the first one quite a bit. We have a lot of the same talent back, but something is completely off with this film. Maybe it's the fact that it's over two and a half hours long. It could be the fact that Chadwick Boseman's not alive to reprise his role as Black Panther. It could be the fact that this was filmed during COVID, so there was probably a ton of production issues. It could be a lot of things. It probably is a lot of things. But something about this was a complete misfire. The pacing, the visuals. Just every decision in the storyline made me scratch my head and think, this is the best follow-up we could come up with. If you want to hear me go on a bitch fest about this film, maybe subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. I'll post a spoiler video in a few days once people have had a chance to really get out and see it. Here we are now. Years later, Shuri's taking center stage as the grieving sister. She gets lost in her work to cope with the fact that her brother's gone. The thing is though, Shuri in the first film was already lost in her work. Very Tony Stark-esque without the Playboy lifestyle. So she was really just in her lab all the time doing cool stuff, which is fine. But when a life-changing event takes place such as the loss of a close loved one, you expect her to kind of do something different so that we can see her go through a change of sorts. This movie often tells doesn't show us the struggles people are going with. So when we see that Shuri's working all the time and she's not getting any sleep, like, I don't see any issues here. She's still building amazing stuff. She's still succeeding constantly. And that's a problem with all the characters in this film and really the MCU as a whole now. Nothing feels even remotely relatable at this point. Most of the time it's characters in front of a green screen. I understand you can't film another planet, so you have to do what you have to do. But sometimes it can be avoided. And even in Black Panther 2, where they do have more practical sets, there's still a lot of times where they punch in really close to faces because they don't want to take the time to render a background behind them or really put them in the scene. So you get these awkward close-ups of characters while they're under the water just going like, mm-hmm, or, whoa, look at that! Visually, it's not impressive in those instances. Now, it's not an ugly-looking film all the same. There's still pretty good vistas to be found. Doesn't really hold a candle to the first, though. I mentioned Michael B. Jordan is one of the highlights of the first film. He played Killmonger. The sequel has Namor. The issue I have that I think many are going to is he has little winged feet, little angel feathers that go out of his ankles and allow him to take to the air, take to the skies above. Listen, I know these are based on comics and they're not grounded in really any sort of reality you can think of or possibly comprehend, but he should be toppling over constantly with his feet being up in the sky, dragging his body, his head hanging down. It's just a hard pill to swallow. Regardless, it looks dumb as shit every time. There's just so many choices, again, where I just think this is the best shot you could come up with. This CG version of his character whipping through the skies like he's Superman at fast speeds, kind of loony tunes throwing airplanes around in circles and the loony tunes type stuff is kind of everywhere. There's shenanigans of plenty, especially when it comes to the Black Panther ship that's constantly beaming people up like a UFO. Ryan Coogler goes all in on the beaming things up. It happens three or four times. Just the slow blue ugly beam, whether it's a coffin or a couple people. We have to see it every time, I guess. It never looks good, but it's there. The basic plot, without giving anything away, is there's an underground civilization of people. Think Aquaman, they don't really come above the surface. They keep to themselves until they're pissed off, until they're goaded into doing so. But once the humans start getting up in their grill, up in their business, they have to come up to the surface. And that's when things go awry. And then it's really just a cacophony of different noises, different little plots playing out that all go to this overall struggle, which is Wakanda versus the underwater people. I forgot their name, it doesn't matter. They have their own version of this, which is like a Hadouken water fireball. They also have water grenades, which I think is just the dumbest shit ever. They just have water in a bomb, and they throw it and it blows up more water. Who's building this stuff? They have other tech down there where when I saw it and they revealed it, I'm just like, what? Speaking of tech, there's a new character in this, a young woman from MIT who's really the crux of this whole thing. They're trying to get to this woman, this McGuffin, if you will, a genius Tony Stark level brilliance, and she makes all sorts of stuff really quickly. You're gonna notice that throughout the film, that people just whip stuff up. There's no real movement of time. Things probably take months, but it's hard to know. Everything's kind of just going from one place to another without a second thought. So it's like, oh, I want to build this. And five minutes later, she's like, check out this thing I built. Oh, okay. Is it really all that bad, though? And I'm gonna say yes. It really is all that bad. I don't want to see this movie ever again. There's not a single moment that stood out where I was like, wow, that was really cool. That was a fantastic sequence. The action's very ho-hum. The music, the score, which was awesome in the first is very hum-drum. And that runtime is very not fun. So what do I have besides a bunch of bad rhymes? Well, a Black Panther sequel that really doesn't need to be here. It doesn't have anything really that unique or interesting to say. There's no, like, aha moments or, well, I didn't see that coming, situations. It's just a lot of, like, okay, I get from the trailer what's going on and that's exactly what it is. There's one incredible scene. It's incredibly awkward, borderline insulting to the character of Black Panther. And then we're pretty much done there. I don't think there's anything at the way end from what I've been told. I didn't stick around. I couldn't be there any longer. I don't like Black Adam because it's dumb as shit, but I would rather sit through that any day of the week than this Wakanda Forever nightmare because it's shorter, way more action, way more fun, way more everything, basically. Black Panther is not even, like, a good somber experience. It's not even a good, like, morning film. The stuff they do for Chadwick Boseman's character, T'Challa, just kind of, like, it felt almost necessary. It felt almost something they had to do to get out of the way. I didn't have any emotion throughout this film and I thought for sure they would hit me in the feels with the Boseman stuff. Like, if you can make me shed a manly tear for Paul Walker in one of the dumb-ass Fast and the Furious movies and you can't in a property that I genuinely like, you did something wrong. You did something wrong. Did you see this movie already? Let me know in the comments what you thought of this cartoonish sequel. Like the video if you had a good time. Again, please think about subscribing if you haven't to post tons of movie content each and every week. We'd love to have you stick around. Wakanda Forever, all that stuff. See you later. There's a $1 tier. A $10. It goes all the way up to $30. And if you're a $30 myth rule member, you get to request a movie review. I have to do. It's a good deal. It's a fun time and I think people are enjoying it. So, yeah, maybe think about doing that. I'm also on Discord at Adam Does Movies. I'm on TikTok. I'm on Twitch. You can find me places if you look. I'd like to see you.