"Black Panther" is more Marvel gold...

Yay!  A new Marvel movie!  Two or three times a year over the last decade, we comic-book nerds get to rejoice in the evidence that our once-sneered-upon culture has taken over the zeitgeist of the early 21st century.  This year begins with Marvel giving the Black Panther character introduced in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War his own film, and what a great addition to Marvel Studios’ ongoing series of movies it is. 

As Marvel tends to do, this particular movie fills something of a sub-genre - sure, it’s a “superhero” film, but much like Ant-Man was the “heist” film and Captain America: The Winter Soldier was the “political thriller,” Black Panther is a James Bond film with spandex.  We learned in Captain America: Civil War of the (fictional) African nation of Wakanda, and how T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) assumed the mantle of king of that nation when his father was killed.  We also learned that wearing the crown of Wakanda also means wearing the spandex of the Black Panther, but it is in this film that we learn what makes Wakanda so special and how the rest of the world knows next to nothing about it. 

Director/co-writer Ryan Coogler, who revived the Rocky franchise with Creed, (a flick that I promise I’ll get around to seeing one of these days) works movie magic with a cinematic blend of super sci-fi, Bond-ian type gadgetry and villains bent on societal anarchy.  He and his cinematographer and design team have set up a rich culture filled with wondrous locations and several distinctly different tribes, details that help make the characters become individuals, and not merely place-holders.  Even better, the screenplay amazingly does not waste any of the characters.  

All of the warriors, both men - W’Kabi (Daniel Kaluuya) and M’Baku (Winston Duke), and women – Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), Okoye (Danai Gurira), and the still-insanely beautiful Angela Bassett (who plays Ramonda, T’Challa’s mother) serve a purpose in driving the film’s story.  Heck, T’Challa’s sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) effectively serves as this movie’s “Q” to T’Challa’s Bond.  The script fleshes out the royal family’s in-house drama wonderfully, and crafts a villain, “Killmonger” (Michael B. Jordan), that is perhaps the Marvel movie universe’s second-best villain ever, after Loki.  

It is nice to have a stand-alone film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe every few times out, one that is not a TOTAL continuation of the ongoing narrative running throughout all eighteen movies of the series.  Ant-Man was like that, as was the first Guardians of the Galaxy.  This isn't really an origin tale, as T'Challa is already the Black Panther at the film's start, but his beginnings are touched upon.  Sure, Black Panther contains mentions of things that happen in other movies, and has characters that have been seen in other movies, but none of those items require you to have seen any of the previous titles in the franchise.

Of course, no movie is perfect (well, maybe Lawrence of Arabia was perfect, but that’s another discussion for another time…), and Black Panther is not without minor grumbles.  There are a few hints of story elements never followed through (Okoye and W’Kabi, for instance, are mentioned fleetingly as being lovers in what feels like might have been an excised sub-plot), and some of the CGI action shots were less than convincing, but if such things are the worst that can be found in the film, then I don’t have any problem calling it one of Marvel Studios’ best efforts to date.

While plenty of other writers, reviewers and commentators have waxed ad nauseum about the political, philosophical and “social justice” implications of this movie, I refuse to go down that rabbit hole.  This particular white Anglo-Saxon Protestant conservative heterosexual male is merely a comic-book nerd, and doesn’t apply labels or checkboxes to the factors that make up his entertainment.  That said, I can assure you with a broad smile that Black Panther is tremendously entertaining.

The "Spectre" of Bond films Gone By...

I said in my review of Skyfall that I’ve never viewed the Daniel Craig Bond films as a strict continuation of the Bond franchise.  Producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson stated that Casino Royale was a reboot of the property, and I’ve always taken them at their word and mentally separated these movies from their predecessors.  It took a while for me to find a place in my consciousness for the Craig-era films, though, as they most certainly don’t take place in the same world as the first twenty movies.  The now-four films of this series occupy a different place for me than do the six Connery films, the seven Moores or the four Brosnans (I sorta tack on the one Lazenby flick with the Connerys, though - it was that good).

While I have thoroughly enjoyed the Craig films (yes, even Quantum of Solace - it’s grown on me over the years), none of the first three has quite felt like a “Bond Movie” to me, although Casino Royale came pretty dang close.  Spectre, however, has the “feel” of a Bond movie for me.  It has the patterns we expect of a Bond movie - the pace, the rhythm.  The gun-barrel opening is here, for the first time in the Craig era.  There’s a journey by train (and one hell of a fight), a la From Russia, With Love; a mountaintop health retreat, a la On Her Majesty’s Secret Service; a 1948 Rolls Royce appears out of the desert, a la Goldfinger. All of these winks to Bond’s past (and a few others) pop in and out of the plot, but director Sam Mendes and his screenwriters, all back from Skyfall, wisely don’t shove them in our faces.  

The pre-title sequence is a seemingly one-take, Touch of Evil-ish scene through the streets of Mexico City during the Day of the Dead festivities, leading to a three-way fistfight in a helicopter above a crowded city square.  It seems there’s yet another shady criminal organization trying to take control of the world’s intelligence services, one with which Bond has been unwittingly crossing paths for three movies now, and this ring carved with an octopus is the clue Bond has been needing all this time. Through real-world Snowden-like dealings in the British government, the 00-programme is on the verge of being shut down, so Bond is once again on his own, off to Italy to infiltrate what seems to be the secret society’s annual shareholders meeting and have a fantastic car chase. Then off to Austria to collect the required female adventuring companion, one Madeleine Swann (Lea Seydoux), and ultimately to Tangiers in pursuit of the everyone-says-he’s-dead Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz, looking quite like Charles Gray and dressed remarkably like Donald Pleasence… hmmm...) in his secret desert hideout.  Now if all that doesn’t sound like a Bond flick, just what the heck would?

Spectre’s almost two-and-a-half hour running time didn’t phase me, but despite all of that screen time, there are characters that are sadly underdeveloped or underutilized.  Monica Bellucci, whose casting was much ballyhooed by the press as being novel, in that there was finally an age-appropriate actress as a “Bond Girl,” is in-and-out of the movie fairly quickly, and the sequence with her character almost so unnecessary to the plot that one might forget about her once it’s over. While M and Q (Ralph Fiennes and Ben Whishaw, both fantastic) are involved in this story better and more entertainingly than any incarnation of those characters ever has been before, Naomie Harris’ Moneypenny is sadly underused, a disappointment after the potential for growing her and Bond’s relationship at the end of Skyfall.  Even the almost-obligatory scene where the primary baddie has Bond in his clutches falls prey to the spy-thriller trope of the monologue-ing villain, leading me to hear Seth Green in the back of my mind, screaming to Dr. Evil in the first Austin Powers movie to just pop the hero in the head so we could get on with things.

Spectre is not a letdown after Skyfall by any means, but it is a different movie, and one should keep that in my when buying his ticket. It is not as in-depth as Skyfall, but it is more fun, with Bond exhibiting a bit more of the dry humor we’ve loved from the character these last fifty years. Craig actually seems to be enjoying the character more than he ever has before, although you’d never suspect that from all the public griping about being Bond he’s doing to the press these days.  I once complained that his portrayal of the character was more James Bourne than James Bond, but the part has evolved in these last two movies, and he in the role, turning it into something more familiar, yet all his own at the same time.

If you go to this movie basing your expectations on your experience with Skyfall, you may be disappointed, so don’t fall into that line of thought. Spectre seems to be more about the tone of Bond’s world than the particulars of any story set in it.  It has a different pace than Skyfall because it tells a different story, about a character in a different place in his life, and yet it’s still exactly what you should expect of your Bond flicks - an extraordinarily entertaining action/fantasy thriller, and one you’d be glad you saw in a theater.

"Skyfall." Best. Bond. Ever.

That's right, I'll say it again in case you misunderstood me - Best.  Bond.  Ever.  I could just quit writing right there, because it really doesn’t get any simpler than that.  Don’t get me wrong – Goldeneye was great.  I still love Thunderball and Goldfinger.  Even Live and Let Die was pretty good, but if we are to take the word “reboot” literally, then I have to consider the Daniel Craig era as a separate entity from the rest of the Bond series, and as such, Skyfall is simply the best of the bunch.  One of the greatest sensations I can hope to experience as a moviegoer is when a movie lives up to my high hopes for it.  This one most certainly does.

After an intense pursuit of a stolen hard drive that contains vital information through the streets of Istanbul, Bond is wounded during a desperate fight atop a moving train, flung to a river below and left for dead.  MI-6 continues on without him, but when the complex plot of a cyber-terrorist to discredit and disgrace “M” (Judi Dench) begins to take shape, he reappears from the dead, only to be told that he’s possibly too old and out-of-shape to continue serving.  Not that he or “M” would allow silly things like physical evaluations and psychological profiles to keep 007 out of action for long, so rules are bent and superiors are ignored, and Bond then jet-sets halfway across the globe in pursuit of those who seek to make use of the information on that stolen hard drive.

That information turns out to be the identities of every covert operative currently undercover in terrorist organizations all over the world, and it’s being used by some evil mastermind to wreak havoc on MI-6 in general, and on “M” in particular.  The villain turns out to be a former MI-6 operative named Silva (played by a wonderously-creepy Javier Bardem, who can do Creepy Bad Guy better than most, as proved by No Country for Old Men), whose plans turn out to be much more complex, and much more personal, than mere cyber-terrorism.  His first meeting with Bond must be the grandest entry of any Bond villain into a film, and his ensuing conversation with him must also rank as the strangest.

Of course, it’s amazing what an Oscar-winning director can do for a franchise-formula movie (pay close attention to that statement, Walt Disney company, when deciding who will helm the next Star Wars flick…).  I have wondered what sort of “action movie” Sam Mendes could make from the moment I heard of his hiring to direct this film.  I mean, let’s face it – American Beauty and Revolutionary Road were wonderful movies, but they don’t exactly make one think he could just as easily have made Die Hard or something like that.  That said, I’ve had a gut feeling all along that he’d pleasantly surprise us and would make Skyfall something special…  and he sure as Hell did.

Mendes has given us the most visually gripping Bond film I can remember.  As exotic settings have always been a staple of the Bond series, Mendes makes fantastic use of the nighttime settings of Shanghai and Macau, with a skyscraper’s glass and a city’s neon lights apparently being the new trees and foliage in which snipers ply their trade these days.  The gloom of Scotland, the light bulbs of the London underground, and the harsh sunlight of an abandoned island in the South China Sea are all important parts of Mendes’ lovely finished product.

I can’t rave enough about this script, either.  Skyfall is certainly the most character-invested film of the entire Bond series.  We see Bond have doubt about the world changing around him.  We see “M” face her mortality.  We see other, younger operatives suffer the consequences for actions demanded of them.  We see the people to whom they answer question their very necessity in the modern world and the wars we might fight.  We also, for the first time in the fifty-year history of the cinematic version of the character, see that Bond actually did exist before he was granted his Double-O status. Screenwriters Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan apparently took advantage of the extra two years provided by MGM’s financial problems to hone this script to near-perfection, and given the sorta-flat previous film in this series (that would be Quantum of Solace, which actually began filming without a completed script), it’s easy to forgive being made to wait longer for this movie.

We’re even given the pleasure of being reintroduced to some of the characters and details we used to love about the series that went away after Casino Royale, in ways that are entirely appropriate to the new style and tone of the series.  There were just enough winks to Bond’s past to be appreciated, but none of them so over-the-top as to make one’s eyes roll at the cheesiness of doing so.  I am so tempted to give away some of these nuggets, but oh, how I don’t want to deprive you of the pleasure of learning these things for yourself (I will blab that it’s great to see that Bond made sure the Aston Martin he won from Demetrios in Casino Royale got shipped over from the Bahamas after that mission was completed, and that it has a few specs that harken back to other Bond movies…).

If you’ve avoided the movie’s Wikipedia entry so far (damn those European moviegoers who’ve had an extra two weeks to see it and spoil the surprises for us over here…), then you’re in for one heck of a time.  The pre-title action sequence alone is worth the price of admission, so consider getting a completely fantastic experience the rest of the way as a bonus.  In other words, Skyfall kicks ass.  Maybe I should’ve just left it at that.