A mostly satisfying 'Black Panther' sequel

 

  Black Panther: Wakanda Forever makes  a mostly worthy addition to a series forced to compensate for the death of its star, Chadwick Boseman. After Boseman’s death in 2020, the filmmakers faced a monumental problem: How to keep the series going without T'Challa, its main character?

   Viewers will no doubt argue about how well director Ryan Coogler solves the problem, but Coolger —who directed the first installment —lays the groundwork for more Black Panther movies by giving this sequel a strong cast of women while maintaining a respectful tone for what has been lost. 

     Is Boseman missed? Of course.

     Wakanda Forever sometimes feels like a movie stocked with supporting players and no clear lead. As the Queen Mother, Angela Bassett receives a good deal of attention, as does Letitia Wright, who plays Shuri, T'Challa's  tech-savvy sister.

     Both Wright and Bassett embody the movie's major theme: coping with loss. At one point, Shuri asks how a threatened Wakanda will survive without Black Panther to protect it? Much of the story involves attempts by various characters to answer that question, a process that sometimes feels labored.

    Familiar faces help. When series' regulars turn up, we're happy to see them. Among them: Danai Gurira as the stern general Okoye. Lupita Nyong'o reprises her role as Anika, entering the picture about midway through.

       So what happens in this Marvel extravaganza? 

       Outside forces threaten Wakanda’s tranquility. The nations of the world want to obtain vibranium, the substance that has allowed powerful Wakanda to develop into a tech paradise.

      The CIA acquires a machine invented by an MIT student (Dominique Thorne) that can detect vibranium. The agency has begun using this scanner to survey oceans for vibranium, a manifestation of the imperialist greed that Wakanda loathes.

     But wait, there's more.

     The underwater kingdom of Talokan (yes, a whole other empire) thwarts the CIA efforts. Talokan also has a supply of vibranium, which helps its residents survive in the sea.

     Trouble looms. The soft-spoken leader of Talokan (Tenoch Huerta) wants to join forces with Wakanda to stop the devious plans of the "surface people," as he calls the nations who lust after vibranium. 

    Hoping to avoid global conflagration, Bassett’s Queen Romonda,  a character of pinpoint ferocity, declines, thus lighting the fuse of conflict. Talokan and Wakanda square off in the movie's climactic scene, a nifty sea battle featuring a giant ship and flying warriors.

     A two-hour and 41-minute running time proves excessive, and not everything soars. A less-than-thrilling tangent involves  Martin Freeman and Julia Louise Dreyfus  as CIA agents.

     What I missed most about this edition of Black Panther was the elevating aura of Afro-centric nobility and discovery that permeated the first installment. The sense of ennobling fantasy dwindles as Wakanda Forever spins through its various plot threads and expositional chores.

      The first Black Panther felt like an entertaining superhero movie and a cultural game changer. This one feels more like a step in the Marvel franchise staircase. But considering the heavy burden that Coogler carried, the movie qualifies as a success -- even if we grumble a little.

       Wakanda Forever wraps things up with an appropriate expression of sadness for the loss of Boseman and T'Challa, and perhaps, most importantly, with a clear commitment not to cheapen the experience that captivated so many the first time around.

       That counts for a lot.

Women kick butt in 'Gunpowder Milkshake'

 

     I didn't think that I'd be even a little impressed by another violent comic book of a movie that makes the phrase "over-the-top" seem understated. 

    Credit director Navot Papushado with making a movie that boasts a strong female cast and blasts its way into summer with gusto, style, and a surfeit of butt-kicking pleasures.

    The movie begins when an assassin (Lena Headey) shares a milkshake with her 12-year-old daughter. Crosswise with her employer, an outfit known as The Firm, Mom flees.

     The story then leaps ahead 15 years and the daughter (Karen Gillan) -- now a young woman -- has gone into the family business. She, too, works for The Firm,  taking assignments from Nathan (Paul Giamatti), an "executive" who consults with a board composed of men cut from corporate cloth. 

    Gillan's Sam, who hasn’t seen her mother since that fateful day at the diner, attracts trouble when an assignment puts her at odds with the evil Jim McAlester (Ralph Ineson). A furious McAlister vows vengeance because his son was among Sam's victims.

    You needn’t know much more about the plot which quickly lands Sam at a “library” where three women (Carla Gugino, Michelle Yeoh, and Angela Bassett) lend weapons to a select clientele. They know Sam's mom, who once was a fellow "librarian."

   As the story unfolds, Sam finds herself looking out for Emily (Chloe Coleman), an eight-year-old whose father had the misfortune of being shot by Sam. Realizing that she probably shouldn't have shot Emily's dad, Sam takes the kid underwing. Emily starts referring to herself as Sam's "apprentice."

    Emily also insists on reminding folks not to shortchange her age: She's actually eight and three-quarters.

    Papushado understands that movies such as Gunpowder Milkshake live or die with their set pieces. For the most part, he delivers.

    Among the best action: Sam engages in combat after her  hands have been paralyzed by a fiendish doctor (Michael Smiley). To up the preposterous ante, Papushado has Sam battling three thugs who are stoned on laughing gas.

    As the story barrels along, Emily receives what might be the wildest driving lesson in movie history, sitting on Sam's lap as the movie burns rubber in a nifty sequence that takes place mostly in a parking garage. Where else?

    Gillan makes a strong impression and Gugino (bookish), Yeoh (reserved), and Bassett (censorious) give brief but pointed performances that don't disappoint when the chips are down. 

    Reminiscent of the best of old-fashioned Hong Kong-style action and lots of other predecessors, the movie's finale pits the women against what seems like a legion of angry men.

   Clever and engaging, this wild goof on exploitation cinema is lifted by a kick-ass female cast that easily could turn up in a second helping. Worse things could -- and probably will -- happen at the movies.

'Soul' puts imagination on display

     Imagine being on the verge of achieving something you've dreamed about your whole life. Jazz pianist Joe Gardner (voice by Jamie Foxx) finds himself in exactly that position in Soul, the latest animated feature from Pixar.  

     Sounds like a serviceable enough premise, but directors Peter Doctor and Kemp Powers quickly pull the rug out from under us, catapulting us from the streets of New York into an alternate reality -- in this case the gateway to the afterlife. 

     Here's how it happens:  Elated at having landed a gig with a renowned jazz combo led by saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett), Joe loses himself in a moment of elation, falls into a manhole, and finds himself on the edge of death.

     Doctor, who directed the much-admired Inside Out, allows his team's imagination to rip as Joe tries to figure out how not to climb the conveyor belt to the Great Beyond. He wants to play that gig more than he wants to ascend into any heavenly realm.

     Doctor and Powers use Joe's quest to cling to earthly life as a vehicle for introducing a variety of characters, the most important of which is voiced by Tina Fey. She's Soul #22, a soul that has no desire to experience earthly existence.

    It's not that Soul #22 hasn't had decent guidance. Souls are instructed by mentors and #22 has had some of the best, including Abraham Lincoln and Mother Theresa. 

     Soul #22 and Joe team up as they juggle their various agendas: It takes a taste of physicality in the form of a slice of pizza to make #22 think life on Earth might not be so bad. 

      The movie also takes us to various other realms that are quickly explained and that are populated by  various characters that provide voice work for Wes Studi, Richard Ayoade, and Alice Braga.

      A confession:  For all of Soul's other-worldly creativity, I hated to see Joe fall down that hole. I wanted to see an animated feature about a jazz musician. 

     I knew that Pixar wasn't going to do a full Ralph Bakshi (if you don't know, look him up), but the opening and some of the music segments of Soul offer jazz and idealized urban landscapes that are so warmly appealing I hated to leave them.

    The movie's jazz score was arranged by John Batiste, familiar from  Stephen Colbert's Late Night. Music for the rest of the movie was written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

      Not surprisingly, there's a moral to the story. Joe must learn that the pursuit of a single-minded dream can blind one to the small wonders of simply being alive, joys that are available to all of us simple because we're inhabitants of Earth.

    Not many will want to argue with the message and Pixar offers another deluge of creativity. Whatever else they may be, Pixar movies tend to be celebrations of animated artistry and its ability to stir the imagination.

Spike Lee issues call to disarm

A showy Chi-Raq breaks genre boundaries. Some of it even works.

Say this about director Spike Lee: At 58, the man's no less risk averse than when he was a much younger filmmaker.

Lee bravely models his new movie, Chi-Raq, on Lysistrata, a comedy by Aristophanes that dates back to 411 BCE, not exactly a period known for its hip-hop atmosphere.

Aristophanes' central conceit involved the efforts of Lysistrata to persuade women to stop having sex with their husbands and lovers as a way of forcing them to bring peace to a society enmeshed in the Peloponnesian War, a conflict that lasted for about 27 years.

Lee, who wrote the screenplay with Kevin Willmott, finds his Lysistrata (a dynamic Teyonah Parris) conspiring to withhold sex from Chicago gangbangers who are contributing to the horrifically high rate of homicide among young black men.

Using a splashy graphic (a map of the U.S. composed of drawings of rifles and revolvers), Lee opens the movie to Nick Cannon's Pray 4 My City, a harsh but hopeful rap anthem.

Chi-Raq, of course, is the name given to Chicago's mean streets, not the city of great architecture, abundant culture and commercial bustle, but the city where gun violence reigns and even the youngest children aren't excluded.

Lee effectively makes this divided-city point by contrasting images of stately downtown Chicago with neighborhood scenes that focus on a far less affluent kind of life.

Lee reduces the Greek chorus to a one-man show put on by Dolmedes, a dapper and sometimes sarcastic Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson's Dolmedes puts the story in perspective.

That perspective includes information presented early on about how fatalities from Chicago's murders outnumber American lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. The story, we'll learn, will be focused on Englewood, one of the city's more dangerous neighborhoods.

What unfolds is a movie of desperate parts, some successful, some less so. Part agitprop, part melodrama, part broad comedy, and part soulful lament, Chi-Raq exists in its own world. You'll either enter that world or turn away.

But if you stay, you'll see a movie that, in addition to everything else, offers a vigorous display of female power, particularly as expressed by Parris, who comes closer than anyone else to dominating Lee's large ensemble cast.

Lee employs many talented actors in what often feels like a wild, theatrical experiment. In addition to offering the opening song, Nick Cannon plays the leader of a gang called the Spartans. As if to absorb all the city's misery, pain and fury, Cannon's character has taken the name Chi-Raq.

Wesley Snipes appears as Cyclops, the orange-clad, one-eyed leader of the Trojans, a rival gang.

Jennifer Hudson plays Irene, the mother of a daughter gunned down by a stray bullet; Angela Bassett plays Miss Helen, a woman who surrounds herself with books and serves as the movie's voice of sanity.

In an unexpected turn, John Cusack turns up as a priest modeled on real-life Rev. Michael Pfleger, an activist who works out of Chicago's St. Sabina Church.

In a lengthy sermon, Cusack rips through a monologue that excoriates the society from whose soil Chicago's violence grows, as well as the community that must rise up to put a stop to it. It's an impressive piece of work that sometimes sounds like a hortatory condensation of Michelle Alexander's important book, The New Jim Crow.

Not all of the bits work and some are ridiculously conceived, notably a scene in which a general wearing Confederate flag underwear (David Patrick Kelly) mounts a Civil War cannon as he lusts after Lysistrata at a National Guard armory. Lee's at his funniest when he nails character, not when he tries to create comic situations.

It's difficult to imagine that Chi-Raq -- the first production from Amazon Studios -- will shatter any box office records. It can be too didactic for its own good, and it's possible that a straightforward story about the impact of gang violence might have been more powerful than Lee's ultra-stylized shout-out of a movie.

But Lee and Willmott, who wrote the satiric C.S.A.: the Confederate States of America, have gone their own way in arguing that the U.S. needs to wake up and do something about violence that is ravaging places that -- more than ever -- need a sense of community.

And at a time when we're again despairing over another mass shooting, this one in San Bernardino, Ca., there's definite value in shining light on Chicago's overlooked carnage

Whether anyone heeds Lee's call to disarm remains to be seen.

'Olympus' falls into a dumb, violent heap

The White House is under attack, along with all credibility
At one point during a preview screening of the woeful Olympus Has Fallen, I wrote these two words in my notebook: "Ridiculous tripe."

That may not represent the deepest analysis, but then depth isn't exactly at issue when it comes to a thriller that's more interested in carnage than commentary. Olympus Has Fallen probably has the late and often great John Frankenheimer spinning in his grave. Frankenheimer put Washington under threat in movies as intelligent and varied as The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May. Olympus Has Fallen puts Washington under threat with a barrage of CGI-created rubble, rampant gunfire and laughable turns of plot.

Director Antoine Fuqua, working from preposterous script by Creighton Rothenberger and Katrin Benedikt, creates a film that slams its way toward a simple-minded mano-e-mano finale between a lone Secret Service agent (Gerard Butler) and a rogue terrorist from North Korea (Rick Yune).

Fuqua (Training Day) is not without talent, but a movie about a terrorist attack on the White House either needs to stake a claim in the world of fantasy or pass a rudimentary test of realism: Olympus Has Fallen does neither.

And rather than lending the movie an air of topicality, recent bellicosity on the part of North Korea struck me as little more than an unfortunate coincidence.

If Olympus attracts a crowd, it may be because audiences are willing to regard it as an example of enhanced mayhem, an accepted form of entertainment these days. I'd blame our endless capacity to find joy in watching things and people destroyed, as well as the presence of a strong but ill-used cast that includes Aaron Eckhart (as the president), Morgan Freeman (as Speaker of the House and eventually acting president), Melissa Leo (as Secretary of Defense), Angela Bassett (as the head of the Secret Service) and Radha Mitchell (as the wife of Butler's character, one Mike Banning by name).

That's an impressive line-up, but acting hardly matters as Fuqua pours on enough mind-numbing action to swamp the movie's opening scenes, which at least are novel, if not entirely believable.

In the middle of a blinding snowstorm, the president is being driven from Camp David to the home of one his major donors for a Christmas party. The president's limo veers off the road, resulting in the death of the First Lady (Ashley Judd).

Judd's character dies despite Banning's efforts to save her. The grieving president, who also has a young son, decides that Banning should be shelved. Stuck in an office job at the Treasury Department, Banning doesn't reactivate until a visit from the Prime Minster of South Korea goes terribly awry.

As part of the attack, Yune's Kang -- a terrorist who leads a small army against the White House -- works his way into the underground fortress where the president and his team are hidden once the attack begins.

An even bigger (and, of course, world threatening) plan lies beneath all the surface pyrotechnics, but that scheme proves as dumb as everything else about a movie that relies on lame dialogue, rote performances and the willingness of audiences to make gargantuan suspensions of disbelief.

Olympus Has Fallen isn't the first movie to litter the screen with violence, but this one makes an apologetic attempt at self-justification by wrapping itself in the America flag.

In so doing, the filmmakers suggest that the old adage had it all wrong: Patriotism isn't the last refuge of scoundrels. It's the last refuge of hack work. I don''t know how you'll feel, but I'm not saluting.

Two wedding invitations from Hollywood

This weekend, Hollywood has issued invitations to two weddings, but I wouldn't necessarily rush to RSVP. Both movies -- Something Borrowed and Jumping the Broom -- have problems, but given the choice, I'd head for Martha's Vineyard, where the livelier and slightly more realistic Jumping the Broom takes place. Both movies have a sitcom flavor and both are heavily reliant on contrivance, but I prefer Angela Bassett and Paula Patton (as mother and daughter) to Ginnifer Goodwin and Kate Hudson (as best friends). Besides, Jumping the Broom, unlike its competitor, offers some real laughs.

A QUICK LOOK AT SOMETHING BORROWED

In the thoroughly mediocre Something Borrowed, Ginnifer Goodwin plays Rachel, a lawyer who has two best friends: Darcy (Kate Hudson), a woman Rachel has known since childhood, and Dex (Colin Egglesfield), a guy with whom she attended law school. When Rachel fails to acknowledge her romantic interest in Dex, Darcy swoops in for the kill. Dex and Darcy clearly make for an oil-and-water couple, but they're soon engaged. It doesn't take long for the movie to start feeling like junior high school with the principal characters trying to outdo one another. Meanwhile, Rachel's level-headed buddy (John Krasinski) encourages her not to defer to Darcy. The trailer gives away the movie's major twist, so I don't feel bad about including it in this brief review: Rachel and Dex sleep together, which puts Dex in a tough spot. He must decide whether to go through with the wedding or follow his heart. Goodwin (the new Doris Day?) knows how to handle this kind of role; Hudson tends to be shrill and over-the-top; and Egglesfield seems longer on looks than personality. As romcoms go, Something Borrowed feels entirely familiar, less a full-bodied movie than a cardboard cutout.

CLASSES MINGLE AND CLASH AT AN UPSCALE WEDDING

After a variety of unsatisfying one-night stands, Paula Patton's Sabrina pledges not to sleep with another man until she's married. It doesn't take long for Sabrina to become engaged to Jason (Laz Alonso), a New York investment banker who grew up in downscale Brooklyn. Conflicts arise when it becomes clear that Sabrina's well-heeled family is unprepared to accept Jason's mom, a truculent postal worker played by Loretta Devine. Devine squares off against Angela Bassett, who plays Sabrina's take-no-prisoner's mom. The script by Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibb finds comedy in class conflict as families and friends gather at the Martha's Vineyard home where the wedding is to be held. The script also makes room for a couple of stock characters who add humor: the outspoken Shonda (Tasha Smith), best friend of the groom's mother, and Willie Earl (Mike Epps), the groom's equally outspoken uncle. The movie was produced by J.D. Jakes, a Dallas-based preacher who may be responsible for the movie's mild religious tilt. To its credit, though, Jumping the Broom seems more interested in entertaining than in proselytizing. The movie is not without clinkers, not the least of which involves a melodramatic twist the script easily could have done without. But director Salim Akil keeps the movie percolating as it heads toward its predictable conclusion, having only flirted with a few real issues, but at least acknowledging the world in which they exist.