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This is the first Marvel Movie that was truly boring. Some of the Marvel movies, like Ant Man, Black Panther, and the last two Spiderman have been pretty badly written movies, but they all have a pace and great action that engages the audience. This movie, by the halfway point had a weak skirmish between over matched US Soldiers and Fish People, a weak skirmish between over matched French Soldiers and Spear People, and finally a really run of the mill by-the-numbers "We have You surrounded!" scene where three protagonists escape US Soldiers only to face the Fish People. There is one 5 out of 10 level action fight with spears that climaxes this scene. The rest of it...the car chases, the Junior Iron man suit, the drone crashing....all of this stuff was tired lame done better before action.

For 90 minutes you watch Angela Bassett overact, Julia Dreyfus badly act, Martin Freeman do nothing. Florence Kasumba does as much as she can with her one dimensional character. Letitia Wright does a pretty good job though. Dominique Thorne I can not decide...did she suck or is the character so contrived, stupid and bad that there was nothing she could do. But it is mostly hokey and horrible. Tenoch Huerta (Prince Namor), good or bad? Competent enough, but the character simply is not Sub-Mariner.

And I will say this. Michael B. Jordan's departed Kilmonger is brought back to do a scene in the movie. Watch that scene..it is an example of the worst acting I've ever seen in a movie. This guy literally read his lines about at the competence level of High School Drama production. He is stunningly horrible in this scene.

Mainly this is just boring. An extended African send off for the late Chad Boseman, whose tragic death clearly crippled the Black Panther franchise, followed by UN Wakandaphobia, and then Sub Mariner taking Surhi down to Atlantis (10 mintues of floating through underwater Disneyland to bad music)...which isn't Atlantis now because of the horrible mistake of re-imagining one of the oldest best Marvel characters to fit Ryan Cooglers vision of non-white supremacy and conceding 'Atlantis' to DC's Aquaman. A lot of pointless chatter, scenes of people preparing for watever. A bunch of people do bad African accents. None of the dialogue is important and much of it is cliches. Part of the problem is Shuri's character doesn't have another character to bounce her conflicts off of. It probalby should have been Ironheart, but it could have been Namor. It's a miss because the true story is her emergence as the Black Panther and we just watch it...we don't really empathize with her.

The second half of the movie comes down to an attempt to recreate the Avengers Age of Ultrom climax fight scene, right down to a bunch of slo-mo co-ordinated fight choreography with all the players 'working together'. I can give credit where it is due, it finally delivers the missing action that we expect from a Marvel epic. But at no point is this battle as good as the epic fights we have seen from the Wakandans in the Avenger Movies and Black Panther 1.

I also believe this movie is a bellwether. It is the first time Marvel Studios has made a mistake that Sony and Warners keep making with their Marvel and DC stories. You took one of the best Silver Age characters...Sub Mariner and you rewrote the back story to fit your director's needs. Bad Move. Namor is 'Roman' backward. He wasn't a 'meso American'. The exact thing that made Iron Man and Captain America (and teh first X-Men) work so well was the idea that all you needed to do was follow the Silver Age story. Sony wasted Dr. Doom and Silver Surfer by changing them. DC has done the same with Flash, Atom, Hawkman.

I expect this is the start of the decline of Marvel. Silver Age was 1 Million Unit / Month comic books. Those charactes are iconic. Black Panther was one of them. But when you start moving into the 1970s and post that...those comic book characters never had popularity. Nobody cares about 'The Marvels', nobody is going to run out to see Iron Heart with Dom Thorne; and Shuri as Black Panther, or Anthony Mackie as a new Captain America will not have the automatic audience that the original Silver Age characters had. And as we see more efforts by more diverse directors...we are going to get less popular characters being made into movies by people who are just doing a job...they are not particularly enamored of the Comic book genre. (To his credit, Jordan Peele turned down directing one of these movies for that reason, 'Comics are not really my thing')

This is a super slow moving movie. It is supposed to be atmospheric. The boondocks of farm town remote backward religious Ireland. People eke out a subsistence living and cling to Catholic doctrines while the underbelly of life makes it all hypocrisy. A psychologically damaged Nurse is sent from London to observe a child supposedly performing a miracle by surviving with no food, only manna from heaven. That is the whole story. You learn about the nurse, you learn about the family and its suffering and pain, you learn how this innocent girl is in the deep end of the pool and drowning while everyone watches.

The film uses a pointless 'this is a play about this...' which adds nothing to the story. The filmography is bleak and subdued. There are a lot of stock characters behaving in stock ways. It is a psychological drama, about a woman who needs saving by finding something to hold dear in her life, which she finds in the fate of this innocent girl. But it moves very slowly and has a contrived and fairytale like ending that brings it all down.

Florence Pugh overacts but more subtly than in some of her other roles. Kíla Lord Cassidy relies on whispering her confused, hurt, lost, despondent utterances to appear innocent and damaged, it is endearing, but there is no point where she really gets enough meat or sense dialogue to establish the performance as anything more than adequate. Nobody else is bad in their roles of nuns, doctors, inn keepers, farmers...but not much is asked from anyone.

This is less a psychological deep dive, and more a melodramatic woman's movie with a too simple happy an ending.