BLACK PANTHER

1/2 out of 5 Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong’o, Letitia Wright, Andy Serkis Director: Ryan Coogler Duration: 2h14m

It’s been 20 years since we saw Wesley Snipes fighting vampires in Blade and 10 since Will Smith’s turn as the foul-mouthed Hancock, which means it’s time for another superhero movie with a central black character. (No, Michael B. Jordan in the 2015 Fantastic Four reboot doesn’t count, because that movie doesn’t count. It doesn’t even count to four.)

Black Panther is that movie, but it’s something different too — a step up. For starters, it’s the first mainstream superhero film to feature a black director — I said mainstream, Meteor Man! Ryan Coogler was already a force, with his breakout debut feature Fruitvale Station in 2013 and his Rocky sequel Creed two years later.

It also has black writers: Coogler and Joe Robert Cole. And not only is the hero the leader of an African nation, (the fictional) Wakanda, he’s got a kick-ass allfemale posse backing him up.

It’s also more proof that the best movies in the increasingly crowded Marvel and DC cinematic universes are the ones that tell individual stories. Wonder Woman was much more enjoyable than the busy Justice League and give me a Thor-Hulk buddy movie over an all-Avengers melee any day.

As Black Panther, a.k.a. T’Challa, Chadwick Boseman (Get on Up, 42) has two battles to fight. On the one hand, a one-handed South African arms dealer, played with ferocious, over-the-top glee by Andy Serkis, has stolen an ancient Wakandan artifact made of vibranium, which is more valuable than platinum, more powerful than plutonium and has more uses than plastic. On his heels is a CIA agent played by Martin Freeman, mangling his U.S. accent but otherwise nicely filling out the role of token white guy.

T’Challa also has problems at home, not least that there are powers that desire to overthrow his reign. There’s Winston Duke as the leader of a warrior tribe. And Michael B. Jordan plays Erik, a.k.a. N’Jadaka. Suffice to say he’s got a grudge against Wakanda’s ruling family.

On the side of the angels, Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) joins the cast as T’Challa’s best friend, W’Kabi; and Lupita Nyong ’o is Nakia, part of Wakanda’s Valkyrie-like female warrior caste, and T’Challa’s former girlfriend to boot. Finally, Letitia Wright plays Shuri, T’Challa’s little sister and head of his research and development department. There’s a scene straight out of an old Bond movie in which this latter-day Q shows her brother the latest version of his Black Panther suit. Its nanotech skin stores and then redirects kinetic energy, so whatever doesn’t kill him literally makes his stronger.

Black Panther is a solid outing, serious without being ponderous. There’s a crazy car chase in which T’Challa chooses to ride on the car rather than inside it and a less satisfying drone battle late in the film that feels like so much CGI padding. There’s also a fair bit of dialogue that speaks to the modern world: Wakanda’s leaders have solemn discussions about whether their country should do more to help the rest of the Earth with its refugee crises and other problems. I’ll consider this movie a true success if a certain world leader adds Wakanda to his African gazetteer, alongside Nambia and Tan-Zany-a.

For now, between Black Panther’s Black Lives Matter subtext and its use of female characters as more than window dressing both in front of and behind the camera (the cinematographer is Rachel Morrison, the first woman to be Oscar-nominated in this category, for Mudbound), it seems as though Hollywood has, for one shining moment, caught up with the real world. Now the trick will be staying there.

Martin Freeman calls it his “little Han Solo moment.”

We won’t divulge many details, as it is also a key moment in Ryan Coogler’s mega-budgeted superhero film Black Panther. But it involves Freeman’s dashing CIA agent Everett K. Ross leaning on his training as a fighter pilot for a nail-biting, climatic scene that takes place during the heat of battle in the fictional, technically advanced African nation of Wakanda.

“I was really pleased,” says Freeman. “I thought it was generous on the film’s part. We’re not short of white heroes in movies. So I thought to give one of the two white characters a bit of a heroic moment spoke very well of them.”

As Freeman is quick to point out, Black Panther is not about Everett K. Ross. He is a sidekick in the film, albeit a heroic one who is able to take charge in chaotic situations.

So Freeman was adamant that Ross not be a “schmuck” when interacting with Black Panther’s titular hero and his many heroic cohorts. While the British actor has proven to be an expert at deadpan comedy — check him out in the U.K. version of The Office or his turn as a loyal sidekick Dr. John Watson in Sherlock — he wanted Ross to be more than comic relief.

“In Black Panther he is going to be put out of his comfort zone enough that he doesn’t have to also be goofy,” Freeman says. “It’s enough that a guy very good at his job with some status is put out of his comfort zone and completely has his mind blown. It doesn’t need to be silly.”

Like the Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman), Ross made his Marvel movie debut in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. Freeman signed on with the understanding that the character would eventually reappear in some form in the Marvel Universe.

It may seem like an against-type swerve for Freeman, who first gained prominence as the mellow, self-deprecating Tim Canterbury in the original U.K. version of The Office opposite the narcissistic David Brent of Ricky Gervais.

But since then he has shown his range, particularly on prestige television. In Crackle’s thriller Startup, he won good reviews as the corrupt and creepily aggressive FBI agent. In the first season of the Calgary-shot FX dark comedy Fargo, he offered a nuanced turn as a sad-sack insurance salesman who slowly discovers his talents for murder and mayhem.

He has gone heroic before. His Watson in Sherlock is an Afghanistan war veteran and he was believable as J.R.R. Tolkien’s reluctantly heroic Bilbo Baggins in the threepart Hobbit trilogy.

But Freeman’s Ross is much more of a take-charge type of guy who dodges bullets, interrogates baddies and pilots futuristic crafts in Wakanda.

“It feels pretty crazy,” Freeman says about the action sequences. “The shoot-’em-up scene in the Korean casino is just full of very impressive work by stunt people. You see those people really earn their money, taking proper tumbles and dives and falls and just doing lunatic things that I’m glad it’s not my job to do.

“It’s loud, it’s chaotic. It’s an organized chaos, but when the scene is going on and there are squibs going off everywhere and explosions and stunt guys flinging themselves down stairs, you think ‘I’m staying out of the way of that 6’4 guy who is going to fall right next to me.’ ”

As for that “Han Solo” moment , much of Ross’s heroics were aided by green-screen technology, which also presented unique challenges for the actor.

“The challenge there is, genuinely, to avoid bad acting,” Freeman says. “Because you are imagining everything. I did that scene several months after principal photography. So you’re getting back into that world of ‘Hang on, who is doing what? Where am I?’ You’re imagining everything you’re seeing because you’re not seeing anything and you are not acting with anyone else.

“It’s all things that are rife for making you do some terrible acting. That’s the challenge for me in scenes like that: not overdoing it, not underdoing it. Yeah, just not being s—. That’s the main challenge in all acting. All my work is trying not to be s—.”