Film Review

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

The people of Wakanda fight to protect their home from intervening world powers as they mourn the death of King T’Challa.

Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther (2018) was a critical and commercial smash hit that also became a major cultural event, giving the black community a hero to aspire to and a fictional civilisation to feel proud about seeing on screen. It also made a star of Chadwick Boseman — playing the eponymous superhero with such dignity, poise, and grace — who followed it with awards-worthy performances in other projects. Tragically, Boseman died of colon cancer in 2020 while Black Panther 2 was being developed; something that shocked everyone and threw Coogler’s much-anticipated sequel into doubt. Considering the difficulty in writing around the untimely death of its iconic lead, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever deserves credit for being as entertaining and cohesive as it is, but there’s no denying it’s a pale shadow of its forebearer and fails to recapture the same magic.

The opening scene abruptly heralds the death of T’Challa from an unspecified illness, as…