Weekend Watch: Wonder Woman 1984 And One Night In Miami
Diana Prince is back and there's a momentous meeting for four icons
Image Credit: Warner Bros.
Welcome to the latest edition of Weekend Watch, in which I recommend (or occasionally warn against) movies or TV shows I’ve been checking out. This week, Wonder Woman returns, and Regina King delivers a stunning play adaptation.
Wonder Woman was one of the true surprises of the early DCEU run – banishing the darkly-hewed and super-serious tones of films such as Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, it nevertheless had heft tackling some big topics such as war and human nature. Yet it did all of that while breathing fresh life into Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince, and explaining how she came to leave the Amazonian island nation of Themyscira and plunge into the brutal conflicts of Mankind. Patty Jenkins pulled off an audacious, delightful and (aside from an overloaded final battle that the director has since indicated was pushed by the studio) hugely entertaining example of how to craft a superhero origin story and define how they should be portrayed.
Now we have the sequel, Wonder Woman 1984, set as the title suggests, at the height of the eighties. Diana is a much more distant, sorrowful character here, still holding a candle for lost love Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) and having seen everyone she knew and loved age and die before her eyes. Working for the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, she keeps to herself, routinely helping round up criminals or randomly saving people without looking for credit. She’s drawn back into bigger world events by a confluence of circumstances – meeting wannabe business titan Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) and mousey, nervous gemmologist Barbara Minerva (Kristin Wiig). What happens revolves around a McGuffin I won’t spoil here, but suffice to say it is powerful and dangerous and people should be careful what they wish for.
Being careful what you desire could also apply to the movie itself – 1984 is not the same film as the first, in various ways. It feels splashier yet somehow also smaller and doesn’t have quite the same sure grip on its plot either. Long passages are devoted to exposition, which might be worthwhile if there was real substance to these sequences. But outside of a welcome reunion, little makes it worth spending much time with the characters.
It’s hard not to like some of the sequences here, and Gadot is still a charming Diana Prince, fully embodying the goodness and strength that comes with the role, while Wiig works in the early going as Barbara, before giving herself over to stunts and CG later on. Pascal’s Lord, for all his Trumpy style (despite the filmmakers insisting he has nothing to do with the man) only comes across well when he’s being more human.
Though I’m glad to see a big action movie actually arriving in cinemas (I watched on a screener at home), and Wonder Woman 1984 is an occasionally thrilling return, it’s definitely missing something.
Wonder Woman 1984 is out now in UK cinemas (where restrictions allow) and will debut in the US on limited release and via HBO Max tomorrow. It’ll be available on PVOD in the UK on 13 January.
Image Credit: Amazon Studios
The second film adapting a play to arrive on screens in as many weeks would make a fittingly thematic double bill with Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Both (mostly) contain Black characters within a small space and have them talk about, fame, music and religion. One Night In Miami, adapted by Kemp Powers from his stage work and directed by Regina King (who between her acting and this seems out to prove there’s nothing she can’t ace) has such luminaries as a pre-Muhammad Ali Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), activist Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), NFL star-turned-actor Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and singer Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) as its main characters. The friends gather in the Floridian city to celebrate Clay’s latest boxing match and end up confronting their own conflicts and bonding in new ways.
The whole quartet is uniformly great, Goree capturing Clay’s swagger, Ben-Adir a troubled, subtle X, with Hodge finding strong ways to bring Brown to life and Odom Jr. not just letting his Tony-winning voice do the work of embodying Cooke. Though the movie is largely set in one hotel room, it never feels claustrophobic or staged, the performances springing from the screen.
King and Kemp also show real skill in making every viewpoint here crackle and mix, guiding the dynamic cast, the gravity of the situation evident but never rammed down the audience’s throat. There’s a palpable energy on display, flashbacks taking you out of the room while helping to fill in the participants’ views and arguments.
Like Ma Rainey, Miami seems certain to be in the mix when the bigger awards are handed out next year, and if you’re after something that winds its way around thorny issues with aplomb, seek it out.
On a personal note – because this is being posted on Christmas Eve… Thank you all for reading the blog this year, and a Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays to all! May 2021 be brighter and better.
One Night In Miami will be on limited release in US cinemas tomorrow. It launches worldwide on Amazon Prime Video on 15 January.